Good Enough to Eat Read online

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Keep breathing. I’ll be right back.”

  The phone clicks, and I stand up from the kitchen table, squishing in my soggy slippers, which I kick off into the corner of the room, and head over to the living room and plop on the couch. There is no way that this is my life. This doesn’t happen to women like me. I’m smart and successful and educated and I was never a harpy or high maintenance. Andrew never lacked for a friendly ear or sage advice or passionate sex. I still wore decent lingerie, I still gave head joyfully and without being asked. I never belittled him or emasculated him or acted like his mother or made fun of his foibles. We used to shake our heads when we heard about those couples that were breaking up because of infidelity. We concluded that either the guys were so shitty and selfish they couldn’t keep it in their pants, or so henpecked we sort of couldn’t blame them. We were always shocked that the wives didn’t know. How do you not notice the signs? Baffling. But not us. Not me and Andrew. Nothing about this makes any sort of sense, and for the life of me I can’t begin to figure out why I didn’t know I was losing him, how I became exactly the wife I used to pity. I hear more phone clicks, and Carey’s voice is back. “Mel? You still there, honey?”

  “What’s left of me, yeah.”

  “Kai is going to be there in half an hour to take care of you, and I’m going to stay right on the—”

  “She’s fat,” I blurt out on top of her kindness.

  “Who’s fat?”

  “The woman, whoever she is, he wouldn’t say, he said it wasn’t the right time to get into that, but she’s fat. Fat like I used to be.”

  “Oh.” Carey clearly hasn’t expected this.

  “Yeah, I know. Kind of a kick in the head, huh?” I start chuckling, although it sounds more like I’m gargling chowder. Then the chuckle turns into a laugh. “SHE’S FAT! A big old roly-poly just like I was! You know, I was always so goddamned IMPRESSED with him for falling in love with me despite my girth. I always thought he was one of those guys who just sees that size doesn’t matter, who recognizes all the benefits of not being with some stick. I gave him such credit, the handsome, fit guy who is so self-confident he can show off his whale of a wife without blinking an eye.”

  “Mel . . .”

  “No, I know I was deserving of love when I was big, but I always knew that the love I deserved was because of who I was, not because of how I looked. And the whole time, it was the FAT he loved. It was the FAT he wanted. That asshole was just a chubby chaser the whole time, and all his praise of my endless QUALITIES was bullshit!” The laughter segues into tears as the truth of what is happening really begins to sink in. “I worked so hard, I sacrificed so much for this body, this stupid body that is my lifelong nemesis, and all I did with the sweat and deprivation and aches and pains and frustration was create a body that made my husband fall out of love with me.”

  “Oh, Melanie. I’m so sorry.”

  I wipe my cheeks. “Carey, what am I going to do?”

  “You’re going to suffer what you have to suffer and know that at the other end you are going to be better and stronger and ultimately happier as a result. I know it probably doesn’t feel that way now. But think about it. Would you really rather be with someone who was so deceitful, who couldn’t even discuss his concerns with you? You didn’t just wake up one day thin, honey. You worked really hard for a really long time and it never occurred to him to have a conversation with you about how your changing body was affecting him? He never considered getting some counseling to see if it wasn’t something you guys could work through? He just found someone else and bailed on you? You deserve so much better than that, and I know that deep down, you know it.”

  “I know.” But I don’t. Not really.

  “It’s going to suck for a while, but then it won’t. That much I know.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “I should probably put some clothes on if Kai is coming over.”

  “Want to put me on speakerphone?”

  “No. Thanks though. I’m not going to do myself a mischief, I’m just going to put on my sweats and throw my hair in a ponytail. I’ll be fine. Kai will be here soon.”

  “Okay, I’ll call in a bit to check in on you.”

  “Thanks, Carey.”

  “Chin up, kiddo. You’ll get through it.”

  “Sure. Talk to you later.”

  “Okay, bye, sweetie.”

  I put down the phone and trudge upstairs. I look at the rumpled bed, where not even an hour ago I lay slipping into waking next to my husband, who loved me and was my soul mate and playmate and partner in all things, not at all aware that everything was about to change forever.

  MASHED POTATOES

  The first conscious memory I have of food being significant was the Thanksgiving after Dad died. I was four. We gathered at my grandparents’ house, made all the right noises; there was football on the television and a fire in the fireplace. But no one seemed to really be there. My mom was still nursing Gillian, and spent most of the day off in the guest bedroom with her. And the food was awful. Overcooked, under-seasoned. I remember thinking that Daddy would have hated it. He loved to eat. It’s what killed him. Well, sort of. The police found a half-eaten Big Mac in his lap after the accident. They assumed that he was distracted by eating when he ran the red light and into the truck. I remember looking at my family and feeling like Daddy would be so mad at us for not having a good time, for not having a good meal. And halfway through dinner my grandmother said, “Oh my god, I forgot the mashed potatoes. They were Abraham’s favorite. How could I forget!” And then she ran off crying. And I thought, I’d better learn how to make mashed potatoes quickly or the family would completely disintegrate.

  “Okay, Mel, let’s start with something good,” Carey says. “What happened this week that was really great?”

  I have to think about this for a moment. “Well, the store showed a small profit this week. . . .”

  “Wow, that’s like three weeks in a row, right?”

  “Yeah. Not anything huge, but my accountant says that all we need is a trend. If I can do three more consecutive weeks in the black, we should be able to project the rest of the year’s income. You know, since this is the slow season.”

  “Why slow?” Carey asks.

  “Well, it’s February. The New Year’s resolutions to eat healthy and exercise have worn off, it’s four degrees below zero, and everyone wants comfort food. Chicago in February is no time to run a healthy take-out establishment. No one wants to get out of their cars to pick up a decent good-for-you meal, they want stick-to-your-ribs fare and they want it delivered.” I’m babbling.

  “Well, then, I’m even more proud of you that you’re doing so well in such a tough time.” Carey is unflaggingly supportive. She’s so much more than a nutritional counselor; she is like my life guru, friend, and therapist all rolled into one bundle of positive energy, and I’d never have gotten through the last three months without her. “But I’d like to hear about something good for you personally, not related to the business. Did you have anything good this week?”

  “Well.” I take a deep breath. “I threw out my bed. I just put it out in the alley, along with all the pillows and bedding, and went and bought a new one.”

  “Well, that sounds like fun! A little shopping spree for your new place, right?”

  “Yeah. I mean, when I moved out it seemed logical to take the bed, since Andrew was staying at Charlene’s.” I hate having to say their names out loud. “But, I don’t know, it just felt like . . .”

  “Bad ex-husband juju in the bedroom.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. I got home from the store, exhausted, went to go collapse, and couldn’t bring myself to get in the bed. It was like his fucking ghost was in the fibers or something. And I know that he said he never brought her there, I mean they never did it in our bed, but still. I slept on the couch. In the morning I remembered that the nice woman who did all my window tre
atments had given me her husband’s card. He’s over at American Mattress on Clybourn, and she said that he would hook me up if I ever needed a bed, so I just went over there and picked out the tallest, biggest, squishiest, most indulgent bed they had. And then went to Bed Bath and Beyond to fit it out with down pillows and eight-hundred-thread-count sheets.”

  “That’s awesome!”

  “It was ridiculous. And I couldn’t really afford it, but I felt like I couldn’t afford not to either. Wanna know the weird thing? The bed is named Waking Hours. And at first, I wasn’t really sure why Serta would name a bed that, since the point of a bed is supposed to be sleeping hours. Except that after the first night, I wanted to spend all my waking hours in it too!”

  “And how has the sleeping been since?”

  “Better. Much better. But I’m dreaming about cakes again.”

  Never fails. Stress or sadness, my dream life is all about food. When I decided to lose the weight two years ago, I left the law and went to culinary school, and then got a degree in holistic nutrition. That’s where I met Carey. She was one of my teachers in the nutrition program. My store, Dining by Design, is a healthy gourmet take-out café, amazing food that is amazingly good for you.

  But no matter how much I feel in control of my relationship with food, my subconscious craves the habits of my former life. The days when Andrew and I would eat spaghetti carbonara as a midnight snack after sex, when there were always cookies in the cookie jar and a cake under the glass dome in the kitchen. The days when food was celebration and joy and reason for living and cure-all. A substitute for two dead parents and a little sister who lives in London and rarely calls. A replacement for the children I never got around to having, and now don’t have the energy, money, or husband to make feasible. A way to patch the holes created by a soulless job. A way to fill up that empty pit of hunger that seemed never satisfied.

  “And how do you feel about these dreams?” Carey asks. “Are they still about denial, or are you getting to eat the cakes?”

  Carey has been with me through everything, the hardest-to-lose last twenty-five pounds, the purchase and opening of the store, the surprising end of my marriage. She knows my dreams almost as well as I do.

  “I don’t get to eat the cake. I’m just in the room with the buffet, and the cakes are everywhere, and I’m loading up plates with every possible flavor, and putting them aside to take home, to eat in secret, but then there are people and I have to mingle, and then I can’t find the plates I put aside. It’s extraordinarily pathetic.”

  “Not pathetic. Natural. You’re feeling deprived, physically and emotionally. It’s February in Chicago, and your desire is for comfort food. And you’re working very hard and going home to a place you haven’t fully embraced as home yet. And you are probably a little lonely . . .”

  “And horny.” If we’re going to be honest about it.

  Carey laughs. “Of course, and horny. Will you do something for me?”

  “You know I will.”

  “Get your butt over to Sweet Mandy B’s tomorrow. Buy every flavor of their mini cupcakes that appeals to you. Go home, pour a glass of champagne, light a candle, and eat every one, slowly. Lick the crumbs off the plate; savor the different flavor combinations, the texture of the frosting. Eat until you are full, and then stop and throw the rest away. We have talked about this before; sometimes you have to eat what you crave purposefully so that you don’t fall into a binge of fog-eating.”

  “I know. And I know I’m in a dangerous spot. But you’re right, I do need to address the cake craving soon or I’m going to jump off the wagon and land in a vat of frosting and eat my way out.”

  It doesn’t matter how much I know about this process, how much I am able to counsel others, being a compulsive overeater is no different from being an alcoholic or drug addict. The only difference is that you can avoid drugs and alcohol completely and you have to have a relationship with food every day for the rest of your life. It’s actually the hardest addiction to live with. If you were an alcoholic and someone said to you that you were required to have a single drink three to five times a day every day, but were not supposed to ever drink to excess, or a drug addict who was required to take just one pill several times a day every day, but you’re not supposed to ever take more than that . . . no one would ever make it through rehab.

  “You’re doing great,” Carey says. “I’ll send you an e-mail about our major stuff from today. Keep up the good work, and don’t forget to call or e-mail me if you have any questions.”

  “Thanks, honey.”

  “Thank you! Great session today. I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks.”

  “Okay, Carey. Talk to you later.”

  I hang up the phone and stretch my arms above my head. I head to the bathroom, where I throw my thick, straight chestnut hair into a ponytail to get it out of my way. I wash my face carefully, my skin being my one vanity, and slide a lightly tinted moisturizer on, surprised as I am every day to find that I own cheekbones, and have only one chin. A coat of mascara on my lashes, making my slightly close-set gold-flecked hazel eyes look bigger. This is as cute as I intend to get today. I check my watch. Eleven a.m. A long day stretches ahead of me. I know I should love Mondays, my one day off, but they always scare me a little bit. Especially since Andrew left me on a Monday. I always wake up feeling like something bad is going to happen, like a Vietnam flashback. Tuesday through Sunday I’m up at five for a forty-five-minute workout, and am in the store by six thirty. By the time I open the doors at eleven, Kai and I have cooked in a frenetic burst of energy, and the cases are full of delectables.

  Half Japanese, half African American, and only twenty-two years old, Kai was the star of our graduating class from culinary school. He has better knife skills than anyone I have ever seen, and a cutting wit to match. And along with Carey has kept me sane and functioning these past weeks. Not only did he come sit with me that horrible day, which he refers to as our Abominable Snow Day, but he also essentially did all the heavy lifting at the store for the first week while I walked around in a numb haze, burning things and giving people the wrong items. At the end of that week he came over after work, made me pack a bag, and forced me to move in with him and his boyfriend, Phil, a successful trader. Phil pays the bills, but is out of the house from about five in the morning till about three in the afternoon, which was why Kai could afford to take the job with me for essentially minimum wage, since it is only six hours a day, and only four days a week. On Tuesdays and Saturdays I have an extern from the culinary institute: every other month a new fresh-faced budding chef to train, currently a slightly dim thirty-year-old former dental assistant named Ashley who thought cooking would be more fun than poking around people’s mouths all day, and forgot to find out if she had any real passion for food.

  In the afternoons and on Sundays I have Delia, who lives in the women’s shelter up the block. It’s part of a job-training program they started with the local business owners. Delia escaped her abusive husband in Columbus, and a sort of Underground Railroad for battered women moved her to Chicago for her own safety. New in town, with no contacts, she has been living in the shelter for the past nine months. When she started taking over in their kitchen, the shelter volunteers recognized her love of cooking, and approached me about the program. I pay her minimum wage on weekdays and time and a half for the Sunday hours. She’s a homegrown soul-food goddess who learned at her grandmother’s knee, and it’s been a struggle to hamper her desire to cook things in bacon fat, but she works like a dog and is a fast learner, and reluctantly admits that the food tastes good, even if she thinks the whole idea of cooking healthy is a little silly. “Sisterfriend,” she says to me at least once a day, “at my house, it is going to be fried chicken like the good lord intended. None of this oven-baked-skinless nonsense.”

  All week long there is work to do from sunup till way past sundown, and lovely people to help. There are regular customers to catch up with, and new customer
s to convert, and bills to pay, and products to order, and precise cleaning to do to keep within sanitation regulations. Occasionally on Wednesday nights there are cooking classes to teach, and on Friday nights there are special events. The other nights there are new recipes to test and perfect.

  But Mondays. Mondays are long. Do the laundry. Change the sheets on the dream bed. Clean the condo that never gets very dirty since I’m at the store six days a week for sixteen hours a day. Go to the grocery store and make sure that the fridge is filled with washed and cut-up veggies, fresh fruit, yogurts, and cottage cheese and easy makings for salads and healthy snacks. Try not to think about what Andrew and Charlene might be doing. What sort of plans they are making, if they are talking about me, wondering if they have spent these last three months in a haze of sex and food and happiness while I have uprooted my entire life. Or rather, while they have uprooted it.

  When Andrew finally confessed that it was Charlene he had fallen in love with, Charlene he had been sleeping with, it doubled the betrayal, made the humiliation exponentially worse. Charlene is the managing partner at the law firm where I worked in my former life as a medical malpractice attorney. The life where I made a substantial six-figure income, was married to the man I thought was my soul mate, and lived in a gorgeous brick house in Lincoln Park that was built in 1872, right after the Great Chicago Fire. The life where I leased a new BMW every two years, put fabulous designer shoes on my feet, and ate whatever my 289-pound self desired. The life where I had ridiculous amounts of energetic sex with a man who reveled in every soft curve of my ample frame.

  Charlene was more than my boss; she was a friend. At about 275 pounds herself, she was my partner in crime, quick with a midday candy bar or cookie, the first to suggest an order of onion rings to accompany the after-work martinis. The one who celebrated every one of our wins and commiserated about our losses by taking us to lunch somewhere decadent, where we would order half the menu on the firm’s generous expense account.