Through Thick and Thin (8 page)

Even though they are strictly forbidden on the Zone, along with pasta and rice and many things, Stephanie is happy for mashed bananas. Just a spoonful and Ivy is sitting in her high chair, looking a little sleepy even, murmuring, without any real sense of urgency, “Da Da Da Da.”

“Yes, Da Da,” Stephanie says back to her, and lifts her out of her high chair and holds her close, with her head on her shoulder and gently rubs her back. Almost instinctively she reaches for the kitchen cordless, mounted like the phones of yesteryear, of her childhood, on the wall. She dials Meredith’s number in New York even though she’ll just leave a message really quickly before she sits down with Ivy to her salmon. To her surprise, it’s not Meredith’s voice mail that picks up after one ring (she has somehow rigged her voice mail to pick up after only one ring) but Meredith.

“Hey, Meres, what are you doing at home?”

“I know,” she answers. “I’m being a dedicated dieter, which I think also means I’m being a bad restaurant critic.”

“Yeah, I was thinking you’d be out.”

“Well, I figured since it’s the first week,
just
for the first week, I’m not going to review every night this week. I thought I’d take two nights off from going out, to get all my ducks in a row, Zone-wise.” Even though the only person who could hear her is Stephanie, Meredith lowers her voice and continues, explaining that for the next few weeks, few months, she’s not going to do every dinner and maybe not nearly as many lunches. “I think I could really do okay without lunches for a while. Without lunches, twelve meals a week in restaurants could be closer to six. And anyway,” she continues, “I’ve always been hesitant to review restaurants based on their lunches. Lunches, they’re so different from dinners, so much less of an event.”

Stephanie listens to the explanation, something about it seems practiced, as if it’s already been repeated several times. “Do you feel okay about it?” she asks.

“I feel guilty,” Meredith tells her. “But I imagine guilt is good for dieting, right?”

“Yes, I imagine it is.” Stephanie smiles to herself. “It sounds like you have a good plan, you sound dedicated, good for you.”

“I went to the Food Emporium and bought Egg Beaters, and sliced chicken breast, and cans of tuna packed in water, artichokes,” Meredith continues quite thoroughly, “and a head of cauliflower and apples. I shopped around the perimeters like it says to in chapter eight.”

“You got to chapter eight already?” Stephanie asks, instantly impressed.

“I skipped ahead.”

“You should try to read the whole thing. You’ll learn a lot.” Stephanie says cautiously.

“Right, I will.” Meredith says back right away. Meredith, Stephanie knows this, is never a fan of anything that sounds like it might be the start of a lecture, even if it’s a lecture that will help her lose the weight she’s never been able to lose.

“Anyway,” Stephanie says, not lingering on Meredith’s tone, but rather breezing ahead, “do you know what I learned that I’m so excited about?”

“No, what?”

“Okay, Caryn says that if you have fourteen pretzels, one ounce of low-fat mozzarella cheese, and a green apple that it’s a perfect Zone snack. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m having exactly that, for breakfast, lunch, and snack, and then I’m making one of the Zone recipes for dinner.”

“So wait,” Meredith says, “let me grab a pen. Fourteen pretzels, one ounce of low-fat mozzarella cheese?”

“Or part-skim, I think that works, too. Is part-skim the same as low-fat?” Stephanie asks.

“No, it’s not,” Meredith says.

“Okay, well anyway.”

“Okay and one green apple?”

“Right.”

“Not a red one?”

“I don’t know, Meredith.”

“Okay, and that’s the right proportions and blocks and everything?”

“Yes, Meres.”

“For someone Caryn’s size or for someone your size, or my size?” Meredith asks, and truth be told, Stephanie, in her excitement over the preapproved-by-Caryn snack, did not actually account for the different body mass indexes, and the different block ratios for the different weights you may find yourself at, at different stages of the diet. She feels a flare of annoyance, the kind she’s been feeling more and more often lately. She’s not entirely sure if it’s because Meredith won’t be enthusiastic about the snack combination, or because this diet, like so many things lately, is so much harder than she’d expected it to be.

“I don’t really know,” she admits, and sighs. “I’m going to look it up when we get off the phone.”

“Okay,” Meredith says. “We can just adjust it if we need to.”

“Maybe we’ll get seventeen Goldfish pretzels,” Stephanie says, trying, as ever, to look on the bright side.

“Right, but, Steph?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m a little confused. If pretzels are made from white flour? Can we have them?”

“Oh, well,” and Stephanie feels again, for a second, for maybe more than a second, like she might cry, but stops herself. If she’s not going to cry about Aubrey then she’s not going to cry about Goldfish pretzels. Goldfish pretzels, so youthful and reminiscent of the happier parts of childhood, should not be cried over. “I think it’s fine, Meres,” she says slowly, measuredly, “but listen, if you don’t want to do it that way, there’s a whole book of meal suggestions, I’m sure you can find something else.”

“No, I want to do what you’re doing. But, Stephanie?” she asks, pausing for a moment and then beginning to speak much faster. “It’s very hard, right? And I know it’s only been four days, but I’m really hungry and I am pretty sure I have a headache and I think I feel a little light-headed if I get up too quickly.” When Meredith sees what she thinks may be an opening, she tends to run off with it. She gallops.

“It’s been four days.” Stephanie answers, “and you’re supposed to be hungry.”

“I thought it said somewhere that your blood sugar is supposed to be so balanced that you’re not supposed to feel hungry or headachey or fatigued? I think I feel all those things.”

“Meres, let’s give it a few more days,”
Let’s,
she says silently to herself,
stop raining on my Zone parade.
“Let’s talk about something else.”

“Okay,” Meredith agrees. “But, just, even if they are somehow technically allowed, how possible
is
it to have an entire bag of those delicious Goldfish pretzels on hand, and only eat fourteen at a time? Can people really do this? And by people, I do mean people whose spirits are, if not broken, then slightly bent, seeing as they are on a diet and therefore might really need and deserve a bag of pretzels anyway?”

Stephanie doesn’t say anything, instead she waits for a moment for the Goldfish pretzels to stop tormenting Meredith on their own. And after a longer pause, Meredith asks, “How’s Ivy?”

“Oh, she’s good, she’s right here. She woke up for some reason. I’m not sure why. So I gave her a little snack and she actually just fell asleep while we were talking.”

“Oh, sleep. Good,” Meredith says softly.

“Yes, very, very good. Maybe I should go test the waters and see if it’ll actually stick if I put her back in her crib.”

“Oh, of course, I’ll let you go.”

Stephanie contemplates the walk to the stairs, through the family room, past the door downstairs to the workroom. She predicts Ivy waking up like clockwork the moment she tries to put her down, or even, just going down into her crib and everything being so quiet. “I have another minute,” she says.

“What’d you give Ivy for her snack?” Meredith asks. Stephanie wonders if it’s more of a polite question, something to connect them in case this bonding by dieting doesn’t work, or if Meredith might be inquiring after Ivy’s food because she’s sure it’s more interesting than her own.

“Bananas.”

“You know if we stay on this diet we can’t have bananas, like ever again?”

“I think it’s fine,” Stephanie says even though inwardly she shudders a little bit at a world without bananas, and not just because of Ivy, and not just because of sleep.

Meredith exhales, not loudly, but a little bit more than the regular breathing out, and asks, “How can you look at the world, at your future, and know that, if you’re doing what’s right, if you’re doing what’s best for yourself, then there won’t ever again be bananas?”

Stephanie wonders what sorts of things Meredith might be equating with bananas right now, what other things she worries might never again be in her life (Josh, a boyfriend, a life beyond her career). She wonders what things she herself would equate with bananas right now (a husband who isn’t in an emotional coma, a world that wasn’t shrinking in on her, Martha Stewart calling to offer her a job). “I think you’re being melodramatic,” she says.

“I’m not sure if I am.”

“Well, maybe not then, but I think you’re having the wrong attitude.”

“Maybe,” Meredith concedes, albeit briefly, “but what if I’m not?”

“I don’t know, Mere,” she says because she can’t think of anything else to say, “I really don’t.”

After they’d gotten off the phone, after Stephanie ate her Zone-friendly dinner alone, with one hand, while Ivy slept on her shoulder because she didn’t want to risk waking her up and she also didn’t want to put her down, she gets up and starts down the hall. She stops halfway through the family room, and looks at the door to Aubrey’s workroom, and she goes to it and opens it. She stands at the top of the stairs, rubbing Ivy’s back in soft circles, comforted by the softness of her lavender velour onesie, comforted by the softness of her daughter’s little body underneath.

She’s aware of the light behind her flooding into the barely lit basement and she wonders if Aubrey is aware of it, too, if he’s aware of anything. The light from his computer screen glows out at him, and she can’t see what’s on it. She wonders if it matters whether it’s Internet poker, an Internet pen pal, or even Internet porn, if she really cares what the reason is anymore.

Aubrey’s leaning back in his chair and even though he’s looking right at the screen, he doesn’t seem to really care about what’s on it either. Maybe it’s gained a lot of weight, too. She’d thought for a while that was it, that it was because she had gained so much weight, that that’s when he lost interest in her, when he disengaged. But then, their friends aren’t fat, and even the friends that are just his, not theirs, they’re not fat. And his job isn’t fat, or the world, or Ivy.

If he were having an affair, she thinks he’d be nicer. She thinks he’d be guiltier, and she thinks that would make him charming and salesmany again, which are things she once liked about him, even though now she can’t imagine why. She imagines if he were having an affair he’d try to cover up for it by doing nice things for her. He’d buy her little presents, he’d send her roses. She smiles in spite of everything, in spite of the flowers he would send her if he were cheating on her, at the memory of how much she always loved it when he used to send her roses, at how happy she used to be.

She turns and shuts the door. As she walks away from it, she does know she could confront him. She could say so many things, she could demand so many answers. She could brace herself for when he looked up at her, so much like Rob Lowe in
About Last Night
, explaining to Demi Moore, “I don’t love you anymore.” And as much as she knows she could, she isn’t sure she can. For as long as she can remember, when everyone else would describe her as so sweet, so nice, an amazing friend, a wonderful person, a fantastic athlete, a lovely woman, she had always smiled. But she’d also wondered why no one ever described her as strong. Because that was always what she’d seen herself as, was always the first thing she thought of when she thought of herself. She wonders sometimes if it was never true. But she doesn’t think that’s it, she thinks it’s more that now, everything has changed.

 

 

Meredith stares at the words on the page, stares longer until her vision blurs. The Zone might be, for her, kind of like New Jersey. She looks away from the page. She’d like to think it could be possible that dieting—successful dieting, whatever that might be—might be best actually
done
, rather than read about. And yet with the Zone, she wonders if she’s really ready, if in her early stages of remedial reading maybe she hasn’t quite learned enough. A mystery, she thinks, wrapped inside of a riddle. (She is reminded of the way they wrap dates in bacon at Pipa, on the lower level of ABC Carpet & Home; she’s always been a tremendous fan.)

But she has determined—she thinks—to face this challenge. She has resolved to embrace the very team-spirited and inherently athletic focus Stephanie has spelled out for them. It shouldn’t be that hard. Even though she’s never been the “sporty one” (or the nice one, or the pretty one, which may or may not have simply meant the
thin
one) she’d like to think she has at times taken an athlete’s approach to things. Anyone who works as hard as she does has an athlete somewhere inside. Anyone who is willing to have upwards of twelve meals a week in restaurants, anyone who has a job in which there is always something to do, always more to be done, can think of herself as athletic in some respect, and surely, can handle the challenges of a diet. This is what she tells herself, this is what she wants to believe.