Fletcher opened his arms, and we hugged hard. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even enjoy Edison’s company as much as my husband’s, and though I had just spent ten minutes explaining I now had no idea why I was doing this. I indulged a brief, ugly hope that I’d come upon my brother dive-bombing another box of confectioner’s sugar by something like Day Two, and then I could go home.
Fletcher bowed to rest his forehead against mine. “So is it up to me to tell the kids? That the pretty, considerate, tender, diligent woman I brought home seven years ago, who’s a smashing cook and doesn’t even happen to be a drug addict, won’t be living here anymore?” A rarity, his voice cracked.
“If that’s your version?” I slipped a hand around his neck. “I’d rather head them off on the way back from school. If only to assure them that the woman you brought home hasn’t really gone anywhere, loves them to pieces, loves their father to pieces, and will be back.”
Fletcher insisted on lugging out the other two suitcases, and packing the bags into the trunk. When we were ready to go, he leaned through the driver’s window and kissed me. “You know, I didn’t mean we couldn’t talk.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s a relief.”
Edison shook his fist out his window. “Yo, I’ll see you eat your words, man!” Our departure had taken on the jittery, nervous gaiety of embarking on an intrepid Arctic expedition. If we were driving exactly two blocks away, the journey stirred the same amalgam of optimism and anxiety as starting out on a poorly equipped slog of daunting distance, during which conditions were bound to turn nasty, unanticipated obstacles could prove insurmountable, and rations—this much was certain—would grow perilously sparse.
“Tell you what, brother-in-law, you make a go of this, I’ll do better than eat my words,” said Fletcher, coming around to Edison’s side. “What’s your sister gotten you to promise? What’s the target?”
“One-sixty-three. Back to what I weighed for years, or bust.”
“You cross that finish line, and
I
will eat an entire chocolate cake in one sitting. That’s my version of being made to eat shit. But you’re a long way from one-sixty-three, pal, and I’m betting I get to stick to cauliflower.”
“You’re on, pal. I’d starve for years to see your pious mug plastered with fudge icing.”
As we drove off, I considered the disparity: Edison was gambling with pride, Fletcher was gambling with cake, and I was gambling with my marriage.
D
ropping Edison’s luggage beside his bed, I announced, “I got you your own cottage, since our sharing the same room would be too weird. But that means I can’t keep an eye on you. Nothing prevents you from hitting the vending-machine Doritos. Just remember what I said: any further weight you gain before the starting gun is more weight you have to lose. The Cool Ranch will cost you a whole lot more than a buck fifty.”
“What about lunch?” Edison whined. “Breakfast was jive, and I’m starving.”
“Get used to it. When were you last really hungry? Physically hungry?”
“I’m hungry all the time.”
“The hell you are. You confuse hunger with
boredom
.” I was curt; I was hungry, too. “I’ll be next door. I have research to do. There’s an ocean of fast food on the main drag half a mile from here, but you’ll have to walk. As for walking: get used to it.”
“Jesus. From Florence Nightingale to Mussolini in twenty-four hours.”
“You ain’t seen nothing yet. Pretty soon you’ll be living with Attila the Hun.”
I retired to the adjacent cottage, a small, sweet room with a pink chenille bedspread and curtains of blue dotted swiss. Despite the homey touches, any motel room has a sobering bleakness. Here it is, the cubicle asserted. Roof. Bed. Light. TV with limited channels. Toilet. Desk, with nothing on it but a flyer from the Cedar Rapids I-Max. This, aside from the food we were about to all but forswear, is everything you need, and needing this little was sort of awful.
Fortunately, I had work to do. I called Carlotta, warning that I’d be making myself scarce at Monotonous for the rest of the week, and booked Edison a checkup with our family doctor. I booted up my laptop, agreeing to a larcenous $12.95 per day for WiFi. I wasn’t used to skipping lunch myself, and battled a growing petulance by heeding my instructions to Edison:
Observe
, I recited, feeling like some Sufi space case. Hunger is a surprisingly mild experience. You could hardly call it pain. So why is it so nagging, so insistent? So distracting. It would have to become the norm. It would have to become a pleasure.
My stomach yowled: Fat chance.
Unable to concentrate on the New Holland real estate listings, I slipped out to the vending machine, having fixated on those Doritos. To our mutual embarrassment, I ran into Edison. “Thought I’d get a granola bar,” I claimed, digging for change, and my brother grumbled, “Guess you should make that two.” On return to the computer, I discovered that the granola bar had as many calories as corn chips.
I kept an eye on the clock. Tanner and Cody both walked home, and there was an intersection at which their passages from different schools met. His friends having peeled off, every afternoon Tanner waited at the same oak tree for his sister, whose walk was a bit longer, so they could saunter the last fifteen minutes side by side.
For Tanner to have continued the tradition into his senior year of high school was impressive, surely a last vestige of his role as Cody’s protector when Cleo was metamorphosing from their mother into a demanding, ill-judged pet—one of those baby alligators or pythons that eventually slither off into the sewer. When I lifted the duty of care from him, Tanner had experienced equal parts relief and resentment. His sister’s unambiguous embrace of their father’s second wife irked him. Though they remained a duo of sorts, readily closing ranks in outrage when Fletcher banned frozen pizza, they now led drastically different lives, which exaggerated the disparity in their ages. But Tanner interpreted any distance between him and his sister as all my fault.
Whereas Cody’s memory of their real mother rapidly grew dim, Tanner had been just old enough when their father remarried to conclude expediently that, in preference to choosing between the old mother and the new one, he didn’t need a mother at all. Which was why I was especially nervous of telling my stepson about my “fool’s errand.” If never precisely hostile, Tanner had long given me to believe that my part in his life would always be elective. This made him treacherously inconsistent—fond one moment, icy the next. I worried I was about to give him a pretext for discarding my unnecessary ass completely.
Turning onto Pine Street, I spotted Mr. Cool at the end of the block, his back resting on the oak tree, into whose bark the siblings had years before scored their initials.
“What’s this?” he drawled as I pulled up to the curb. “Limousine service. It’s not
that
cold.” He must have cherished the final stretch with his sister; he didn’t want a ride home.
I got out of the car; Cody was running late. “We need to powwow.”
“Couldn’t wait fifteen minutes?”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Gosh, I’m all pins and needles.” Unfortunately, he was in his remote, sarcastic mode.
“It’s so sweet of you to wait for your sister like this. In L.A. we were driven everywhere, but otherwise it would have meant the world to me as a girl if Edison had done the same thing.”
“
Edison
’s in no shape to walk anybody to the end of the driveway.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk about,” I dived in. “And maybe it’s good Cody’s not here yet. I’ll need you to look out for your sister for a while. You know, the way you used to. I’ll still be a resource, of course—”
“So you’re leaving Dad,” he said—matter-of-fact, with a trace of satisfaction. “Guess he brought it on himself. Least he’ll be the healthiest misery guts in town.”
“I’m not leaving anyone.” Hastily I detailed my grand plan—adding judiciously that I wasn’t at all sure it would work.
He heard me out. “So you’re leaving Dad.”
Rolling my eyes in exasperation, I spotted Cody across the street. She looked stricken. I never showed up in the car like this. Obviously, someone had died.
I waved, and she lumbered with a pack as big as she was to their Meeting Tree. “What’s cookin’?” she asked warily.
“Monotonous isn’t enough for her,” said Tanner. “Pando’s starting a fat farm.”
“You’re a lot of help.” This was not the reassuring briefing I’d rehearsed. I ran through the drill again, which to my own ears sounded far-fetched, self-destructive, and delusional, this time ending, “But I am
still
your mother, I am
not
leaving either of you, and I am
not
leaving your father!”
Cody frowned; it was a lot to take in. “Is Dad clear on that?”
“Not as clear as he should be,” I admitted.
“You said we could visit you guys,” she said. “Why can’t you visit us back?”
“Because your father finds this idea very annoying, and I’ll be honest, he’s pretty mad. Anyway, he thinks your uncle doesn’t have the discipline to lose weight.”
“Do
you
?”
I couldn’t lie to her. “Maybe not. But the only way to find out is to try.”
“So . . .” she said sullenly. “No more real pasta, just that clumpy soba stuff. No more sneaking fresh brownies when Dad’s in the basement. It’s gonna be like living in a concentration camp. Not even any more rides to swimming practice, because you’re going to be keeping Uncle Edison from hitting the Eggos. However you do
that
.”
“Yeah, I sure wouldn’t want to get between that guy and the refrigerator,” said Tanner. “Like putting yourself in the way of a buffalo in heat.”
I sensed they would at least have a wonderful walk the rest of the way home at my expense.
B
ack at Blue Cottages, I plunged into my online short course in losing weight. A search on “diets” produced 43 million hits. I recognized the well-publicized regimens—South Beach, Atkins, alternate day, glycemic index, Dukon, Weight Watchers, Scarsdale, and The Zone—but that was just the beginning. Cabbage diets, smoothie diets, blood-type diets, and coffee enemas. Low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie; 2-4-6-8, what diet do we appreciate. Açaí berry, chicken soup, grapefruit, and lemonade. It got crazier: there were potato chip diets, cookie diets, pizza, candy, peanut butter, and popcorn diets. Hot dog diets, red wine diets, vinegar diets,
Twinkie
diets; chocolate, ice cream, or baby food diets, and one that recommended tapeworms. I was skeptical of the “negative calorie” diet, though I thought the “air diet” might have something to recommend it, and the “cigarette diet” would at least appeal to Edison.
Navigating the Web maze was perilous, since many of these pages were commercial come-ons, planting the kind of cookies that don’t have chocolate chips. What struck me about the enormous industry I’d brushed up against was that all these plans, programs, supplements, and pharmaceuticals were hawking the one product that American consumers both badly wanted and couldn’t buy: that little packet of determination to stick to the program like a sachet of low-fat salad dressing. Even costly procedures like liposuction couldn’t protect you from eating yourself silly once the arthroscopic puncture was healed, couldn’t keep you from slurping every pound of the yellow glop surgeons pumped into a bedside pail in reverse. No highly paid nutritional consultant could
not
eat a cupcake for you. Despite the dizzying array of products packaged deceitfully as such, in truth a slim figure was not on the shelf. I had just tripped over a gravel pit of 43 million pet rocks.
After three hours of this, I felt soiled, and all I could think about was food.
“I don’t think any of the methods I researched is the answer,” I told Edison over our dismal supper at the Olive Garden. “They only raise the obsession to a power. So enjoy your meatloaf while you can. I think we’ll have to make food go away.”
“Seem to recall that’s called ‘dying,’ man,” said Edison through his dinner roll; only my glare had prevented him from larding on a third packet of butter. “What about going local? Crystal meth.”
“So you can be thin with no teeth, covered in sores, and brain damaged.”
“Gastric bypass?”
Keeping myself from wolfing down my baked salmon, I was trying to think deeply about the experience of eating it, and didn’t respond to Edison right away. I mashed the pink flakes around my mouth, their texture sandy from overcooking, the flavor disquietingly sweet. At best, the fillet was mildly agreeable, but only when I paid fierce attention; ordinarily I didn’t. That must have been when I first began to formulate my theory about the elusiveness of the edible. I had looked forward to dinner all afternoon; I might look back wistfully on this meal once anything so substantial as salmon was off the menu; but in that exact moment with the fish on my tongue it was as if I were chewing for something that wasn’t there, as in childhood I’d scrambled irately through a cereal box that failed to contain its advertised prize. The more I chewed, the more bewildered I grew by how this fleeting, unseizable pleasure had so enslaved my countrymen that many of us were willing to disgrace ourselves for it; demoralize ourselves for it; demolish a host of other pleasures for it, like running and dancing and sex;
destroy this very pleasure itself
in its pursuit—for every tidbit I’d consumed since putting on weight had been contaminated with an acrid aftertaste of self-reproach; and even, in extreme cases like the one my brother was fast becoming, die for it. The mystery was oppressive.
“I don’t think so,” I said at last. “Gastric bypass is major surgery, and things can go horribly wrong: infection, stroke. Death, even, which is the very event you get the operation to avoid. Tying off your stomach into a change purse may keep you from eating more than a quarter cup in a sitting, but you still have to starve. The only thing surgery does is take away the decision making. But your decision making is the problem. Even with a bypass, you can cheat; eventually you can tolerate larger quantities, and then you’re back where you started. Besides”—I pulled out my clincher—“they’d make you stop smoking.”