Through Thick and Thin (17 page)

In her lobby, the doorman and the porter both depart from their usually vague nodding, there is actual getting up from their stations even without the presence of bags to be helped with or packages to sign for. They welcome DB Sweeney, who wags his tail at them happily, bestowing a sufficient amount of adorable-ness.

“He’s a new little fella, huh?” asks the close-to-burly man with close-cropped gray hair who sits behind the desk and is technically, Meredith thinks, the doorman.

“He is,” Meredith says, smiling. “His name is DB Sweeney,” she offers, stealing a glance at his name tag.
Steve,
she reads and thinks surely he must be new, surely it’s not that he’s been here a long time and she’s never known his name. Everyone smiles, DB Sweeney wags his tail and looks wise at the same time. There’s only a very slight moment of awkwardness—after they have discussed DB Sweeney, where he came from, how he is a mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix—in which there isn’t anything to say. Meredith smiles again, and as soon as she tightens her grip on his leash, DB Sweeney seems to know and marches, swaggers almost,
left right left right left right left right
up to the elevator bank.

The first thing that DB Sweeney does when they walk into the apartment is turn around and look at Meredith, right into her eyes, for what feels like a long time. It’s not the kind of long time that you wish would end soon, it’s the kind where you feel it would be okay if it kept going on for a while.

“This is home,” Meredith says and she tries to infuse the word with warmth and safety.

He turns his head back to face forward and stands just in front of her, still by the door, surveying his surroundings. Slowly, alternately sniffing the ground, the air above him and around him, he begins to investigate. He walks through the kitchen, throughout the living room, stopping outside closet doors that Meredith opens for him. He investigates the bedroom, the vanity, the bathroom. He returns to the living room and sits for a while in front of the armoire. Meredith, who has been following him around the apartment, both in awe of his summary and checking to make sure there is no danger that could befall him, anywhere, wonders if he knows the armoire is important because that’s where the Bose iPod dock is, and where the speakers are. She thinks she should make a playlist for him, for when he’s alone, and she doesn’t want him to be alone.

After a while longer, after walking the length of the couch, along the top if it, DB Sweeney settles down on the corner section. He places his paws elegantly, gingerly in front of him and sighs. She hopes that it is not a sigh of resignation, but rather one of accomplishment, one of “I surveyed my surroundings and now I will rest within them.” She hopes so. Meredith walks the few steps over to the couch, and stands in front of the corner section. In the very back of her mind, she remembers that she didn’t quite make it to Barnes & Noble, that she didn’t get the Atkins book, that she didn’t take the first step she was going to take on her own. She’s pretty sure it doesn’t matter.

She kneels down, right in front of DB Sweeney. For the first time since Stephanie said, “Don’t call me” (or maybe, even, it’s been a bit longer than that), Meredith doesn’t feel so alone. DB Sweeney looks up at her with his sharp, inquisitive, chocolate-brown eyes. He puts one paw out and then another, and repeats the motion a few times so he is slowly but surely dragging himself on his belly. He stops when he is right in front of her. He reaches his nose up and so gingerly, so tentatively, he licks Meredith’s face. And then, with increasing sureness, he continues to lick. Buoyed, he soon has his front paws on each of Meredith shoulders. He’s on his hind legs, still licking, wagging his tail so quickly as he proceeds.

For the first time in a really long time, Meredith starts to cry.

Stephanie wraps a towel around herself and walks quickly back into her bedroom. She glances at the baby monitor: all quiet on the Ivy front. And then her eyes fall again on the cover of the book. She’d brought it upstairs with her last night and had placed it, perhaps a bit reverentially, on the dresser. She places her hand flat against the dust jacket and swipes at it, even though there’s no possible way there could be any dust. She looks at the cover, at the slender French stick figure marching across it, a lithe illustration to guide her way, to shine a light upon her darkness.
French Women Don’t Get Fat.

She puts the book down and changes quickly into some comfortable Sunday clothes. She pulls on loose black loungy bottoms and an old Lehigh sweatshirt. She can’t remember where she picked up this sweatshirt that has long been her favorite; she doesn’t know anyone who went to Lehigh and it has no sentimental value. She looks at herself in the mirror, also quickly, at what she still thinks of as Sunday clothes, loungy clothes, even though now, more and more often, such an ensemble will make an appearance Monday through Friday, to say nothing of Saturday. She pulls her still-wet hair back into a loose ponytail and hurries downstairs to boil her leeks.

To tell you the truth, she didn’t read the whole book.

There was a lot in the introduction about food preparation. A lot of things about food preparation tend to be off-putting to Stephanie, especially now. And then there was this part about how you aren’t supposed to read or even watch TV or look at the computer (even something other than UrbanBaby) while you are eating. Stephanie reads the newspaper while she is eating. It’s the only time she can find in the entire day to do so. When would she read the newspaper? And
then
there was this whole thing about how there was no glory in quick weight loss. Really, she was certain there was. It was right about then that she’d started to lose hope.

But then—then!—as soon as she had disconsolately skipped ahead just a few pages, she got to the beautiful section about the “Magical Leek Weekend.” As had in fact been mentioned to her before, what you’re supposed to do is boil up two pounds of leeks and eat only leeks and drink the leek juice for forty-eight hours. It “recasts” you and magically gets you to a place where you can eat delicious foods for pleasure. In the glow of the light from the end of the tunnel, Stephanie did wonder if maybe the “Magical Leek Weekend” might also make her, in the manner of French women everywhere, chic. Seeing as it was magical and all. In addition to not getting fat, she didn’t imagine French women often became slovenly and unkempt either, didn’t imagine French women spent a lot of time in a faded Lehigh sweatshirt, whose origins are a mystery, and leggings.

Once she’s gotten the two pounds of leeks clean, and it takes a really long time to get two pounds of leeks clean, Stephanie boils them up, thinking all the while that there is indeed glory in quick weight loss and that such glory will be hers at the end of a mere forty-eight hours.

She doesn’t know if it’s all in her mind, but at the end of a mere two hours, she has a pounding headache. It is all she can do not to eat Ivy’s various homemade baby foods and mashes, to take them right from her little baby hands, as she feeds her lunch.

By three o’clock, as Ivy is at last napping again, it is all Stephanie can do to lie listless in the family room, sipping leek broth, mesmerized by the vivid blues and reds and greens of
Baby Van Gogh.

By nine-thirty she sits in the kitchen, filled with hostility. She makes herself an English muffin, and eats it. Thinking that the English muffin would have been better had she taken the time to spread something on it, she eats several large spoonfuls of the Le Pain Quotidien (French!) hazelnut spread that Meredith brought with her on her last visit. Next, she stands by the window and looks out as she eats some peanut butter right from the jar, enveloped by this new and yet somehow familiar sense of failure. She looks at a streetlamp and imagines they still live in the city, and there are lights twinkling everywhere. She rinses her plate and her two spoons before putting them in the dishwasher and turns to head upstairs.

The phone rings. She thinks maybe it’s Meredith and thinks that she’s the person she most wants to talk to in the world right now, but she can’t. She thinks that like other people who live in this house, even if that word,
live
, is loosely defined, she just can’t deal with this right now. But she doesn’t know what else to do.

“Hello.”

“Hey.”

“Hey, Aubrey,” she says, and she softens for a moment because she forgets everything. How could she forget anything? How, after the months of the way he has been? And then she remembers, and she hardens. She thinks she has to, it has to go that way, there can’t be any other way.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Are you in Chicago?”

“No, I’m in the city. I got a room at the Athletic Club. I just needed to think. I just, I knew that you knew. I went down there and everything was out, and I saw it and saw it for what you must have seen and I had to get out of there, and I couldn’t, I can’t really talk to you about this. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Stephanie.”

“Aubrey,” she says.
Oh, Aubrey,
she thinks and the things she feels—sympathy for him, an urge to protect him, sorrow—aren’t what she wants to feel. She wants only to feel angry at him, to feel lied to, and let down, to feel abandoned and betrayed. And she doesn’t know what it might mean, what it might say about her, that she wants those things. “How long has this been going on?” she asks.

“A while,” he answers vaguely.

“Since you had knee surgery?”

“Uh. Uh-huh.”

“That’s longer than Ivy’s been alive,” she says, and she says it softly because that makes it so much worse to her, and she wonders if it makes it so much worse to him, if anything does. “Why did you start?”

“Steph, I don’t want to do this.”

“I know.”

“First, it
was
for the pain. And then it just, it just started as a way to take the edge off, you know?”

“I don’t, Aubrey. I really don’t.”

“And then it just got to the point where everything was an edge. And then it got to the point where I just couldn’t imagine my life without it. I’m going to stop. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

She wishes for a manual, and she wishes for an instruction book. She pictures a paint-by-numbers book, with directions inside that are easy to follow. She wonders if something like that could help her.

“I think I should come home,” he says after a while. And she thinks of Ivy. She thinks maybe she shouldn’t be in the house with him. She wonders if maybe she should be in the house without him, if maybe he needs to stay in the city for a while, but that’s a whole can of worms, isn’t it? And it’s a very visible can of worms, the kind that a lot of people in Ridgewood could see and she thinks that if she had a manual, in it, it would say,
Aubrey needs a therapist,
and she thinks she’s thought that already before.

“I think you need to see someone.”

“What?”

“Like a group or a therapist.”

“God, Stephanie. I don’t know.”

“What?” she asks him. “What don’t you know?”

“I never thought I’d be in therapy.”

“Well, I guess we never thought a lot of things.”

“I think I should come home.”

“Will you see someone? I can find someone for you. I can help.”

He doesn’t say anything, and then he says, “Okay.”

“Okay,” she says to him, to too many things, even as she suspects that she shouldn’t.
Okay
might not be what is suggested in the handy manual she would so like for there to be, if there were actually a book you could buy,
What to Do When Your Husband Is a Drug Addict.
Come to think of it though, maybe there is. She looks on the nightstand, at the most likely never-to-be-opened-again copy of
French Women Don’t Get Fat
, and thinks there’s a book for almost everything else.

“Okay, Aubrey,” she says. “Okay.”

Meredith makes a right onto Fourth Street and heads down the block toward Knife + Fork where she’ll be having the reasonably priced and quite inventive prix fixe menu. As she approaches, she’s trying to remember if there were in fact a lot of carbs in the prix fixe menu the last time she visited. She doesn’t think there were; she remembers being impressed with the quality of the meats and she remembers thinking good things about the vegetables. But the carbs, of course, they could have been there (as they have a way of being) and she could have just not paid attention to them. Because there was a time, a time that now seems so far away, when carbs weren’t wrong, when their very existence didn’t have to be fled from. There was a time. That time is not now.

In the two weeks since DB Sweeney’s arrival, Meredith has come into possession of
Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution
(she ordered it online, next day delivery, sometimes it’s just so much easier that way). She has not eaten more than twenty grams of carbs per day, and in case you’ve never actually jumped on the bandwagon that is Atkins, ten grams of carbs is about a cup of raw vegetables or a slice of tomato (which isn’t allowed anyway, we’ll explain that later). And she has to say for the record, it wasn’t actually as hard as she thought it would be. She’s prepared a variety of sausages and shared them with DB Sweeney. She’s ordered bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches at the deli on Lexington Avenue, right by the subway, the kind she had not ever considered eating before, even though she hadn’t been dieting. They were just not something she felt a person should eat. But eat them she did after sliding the bacon, egg, and cheese from the roll, and giving the roll to DB Sweeney.