Читать книгу The Divorce Diet - Ellen Hawley - Страница 10

DAY

5

Exercise: I lie in bed and let Rosie play with the window shade until my parents slam the front door and it’s safe to crawl out.

My non-diet book is lying on an open section of floor, where I don’t remember leaving it. My diet guru must have put it there and chosen a passage for me. The clothes have edged away from it.

I pick it up.

Today you will take charge of your life by eating foods that you know are good for you, it says. Pay attention to how your body feels on this balanced diet. Do you have more energy? Are you more optimistic? Do you feel better about yourself?

Oh, yes. I feel so good I may just die of it.

For breakfast, it says to eat a two-ounce bran muffin and a cup of nonfat skim milk.

I check the kitchen cupboards for a bran muffin the size of my thumb. When I don’t find one, it is not, I admit, a complete surprise.

Okay, the person I want to become plans ahead. She makes grocery lists. She reads her non-diet book faithfully and ahead of time. If she finds a very small nonfat bran muffin growing in a field of chocolate éclairs, she’ll eat the bran muffin and only the bran muffin, and she’ll skip away happy.

I could make myself do all of that, but it will happen naturally, as soon I lose weight. There’s no point forcing it.

Breakfast: coffee, black; ½ loaf of stale French bread; unsalted butter.

Exercise: I stare at the French bread and ask myself whether eating it will make me happy.

I laugh bitterly.

I play airplane with Rosie’s cereal and say, “Mmmm.”

Snack: remainder of the baby cereal.

Exercise: I tell Rosie, “If you’d eat this the way good babies do, Mommy wouldn’t have to eat it for you and ruin her diet.”

It’s not a diet, my invisible friend says. It’s a lifestyle. It’s Natural.

I don’t answer and she goes away.

I nurse Rosie and call Thad at work, suggesting we meet this evening so we can talk. He surprises me by agreeing. This means something, I know it does, although I have no idea what.

I carry Rosie to the bedroom and stare at the clothing I arranged methodically on the floor last night. What I’m looking for is something casual but stunning, something that says, You didn’t even cross my mind when I got dressed, but don’t I look great?

When I don’t see anything like that in the first layer, I kick through to the next one. I settle for the clothes with the fewest wrinkles and drop my pj’s on the floor, on top of the methodically arranged clothes.

What am I going to tell my former neighbor about what’s happened in my life?

Nothing, that’s what. I don’t have to tell her a thing.

I drive to her house, and we sit on the floor with our babies in our laps.

Snack: coffee, black.

Exercise: She asks how Thad is and I burst into tears and spill the whole story, starting with how good the raspberries and chocolate leaves looked on the cake I was going to bring her the rest of.

“I don’t even know what I did wrong,” I say.

“He’s having an affair,” she says.

“He’s not that kind of man.”

“Does he have a penis?”

He does. I admit he does.

“Then he’s that kind of man.”

I had no idea she was so bitter about men. Our friendship has been one of convenience more than resonance, and we’ve never talked much about our lives. I refocus the discussion on how hard it is to live with my parents—the TV shows, my mother’s questions, the fifteen-year-old who’s taken up residence in my brain. Even the cigarette hole in the couch cushion and the imitation whipped butter.

“It sounds petty,” I say. “But they’re driving me nuts.”

I drive back to my parents’ house and let Rosie finish her nap in the car seat on the living room floor while I watch the Food Channel.

My lunch is supposed to be an open-face tuna sandwich—two ounces of water-packed tuna mixed with one tablespoon of nonfat mayonnaise and another tablespoon of chopped nonfat celery, spread on one slice of whole grain bread browned in a nonfat toaster, followed by half a juice-packed canned peach.

Either my mother or the diet fairies have actually left me the ingredients for this. I plonk them on the counter, stare at them for a long time, and put them away. I don’t seem to be hungry.

Lunch: just the tiniest bit of red wine; salty crackers made in a gritty, formerly industrial city in northern Ohio.

Exercise: I nurse Rosie, then turn on my parents’ computer and try to create a resume while Rosie sits on my lap whacking at the keyboard.

She misspells my name.

I delete the resume, rock Rosie to sleep, put her on the bedroom floor for a nap, and go back to the resume. I misspell my parents’ street.

I call an old friend who Thad liked to say has a low-level job with a high-level corporation and ask what I should say about the time I took off work after Rosie was born.

“Gee,” she says. “I’m not sure.”

Well, she wouldn’t be, would she? She doesn’t have a baby.

I feel smug about this.

I feel envious.

I feel lonely.

I walk to the bedroom and watch Rosie sleep.

I feel love.

I cry.

I force myself back to the computer and correct as many misspellings as I find. The misspellings I don’t find, I leave. They won’t make any difference because no one’s going to hire me anyway.

This, my guru says, is a self-esteem issue. List three reasons why someone should hire you.

One: I’m breathing.

Two:

Never mind, my guru says. One’s a good start.

To show her how grateful I am, I check my meal plans for the rest of the day and make a grocery list. Dinner is Turkey Caccia-nonfat-tore (mix ½ cup of tomato juice, 2 tablespoons of chopped onion, 1 clove of garlic, ½ teaspoon each of basil and oregano, and 1 tablespoon of Vaseline; pour over 3 ounces of nonfat turkey breast and bake); ½ cup of cooked noodles; ½ cup of shredded newspaper; 10 golden raisins.

Rosie wakes up and I shop for dinner, but the diet fairies have run off with my grocery list so I buy pork chops.

While I’m putting away the groceries, I find a box of prefabricated stuffing. The instructions on the side tell me to use margarine, but I substitute unsalted butter and pretend this redeems what I’m doing, then I cut a gash in the pork chops, pack the stuffing inside, and bake them in the defatted juice of one diet fairy.

When my mother gets home from work, she says, “I’m still capable of cooking, you know.”

“I thought since I’m here and you’re working and all, it might make sense,” I say.

“Just so you know you don’t have to.”

I say, “Mom, I’ll go nuts if I can’t cook.”

“Well,” she says, “I don’t suppose I mind so much, but you know how your father is about food he hasn’t eaten before.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” I say.

She leaves the kitchen and I relax muscles I didn’t know I’d tightened.

She comes back to the kitchen.

“I’ll leave you money for our share of the groceries,” she says.

“Mom, I’m not paying rent. The least I can do is buy groceries.”

I say it like she made me mad.

Now that I mention it, she did make me mad.

“I didn’t suggest it to insult you.”

She says it like she’s insulting me.

Dinner: stuffed pork chops; baked squash; fresh green beans; Weight Watchers ice cream that I found in the freezer.

Exercise: My father points to the squash on his plate.

“What do you call these things?” he says.

My mother goes into watchdog mode.

“Delicata squash,” I say.

“We got any more of them?”

I put the last piece on his plate.

“The secret,” I say, “is to squeeze lemon juice into the cavity before you bake them. It makes them sweeter.”

“Huh,” he says.

I sense that I’ve lost his interest, and Thad’s absence stabs into me. He liked to know about his food. I could do something his friends’ wives couldn’t, and that made him special.

Everything was a competition with him, wasn’t it?

I don’t have to answer that question. Nobody can make me.

I leave Rosie with my parents so I can drive to a nearby coffee shop and meet Thad. The boy working the counter has a pierced lip, bleached hair, a bar code tattooed on his arm, and no wedding ring.

Snack: coffee, black.

Exercise: I wait for Thad.

Thad’s late. I try not to think this means anything.

When Thad shows up, he doesn’t ask if I’ve been waiting long, he just sits across from me and folds his hands on the table. I notice that he doesn’t have a wedding ring either. I hide my hands under the table, remove my own ring, and slip it into my purse.

“So—” I say.

It takes a moment, but he also says, “So.”

I wait for him to say something more, and after several moments he repeats “so” and adds, “How’re your parents?”

“You are not allowed to talk about my parents.”

It feels fantastic to say that. If he can’t talk about them, he can’t criticize them. They’re my parents. Only I get to criticize them.

“I only asked,” he says.

“Well, don’t.”

I study the part of him I can see above the table for signs that he’s having an affair. I’m not sure what I’m looking for here—rashes, sneezing, an unusual level of attention to his looks?

“I thought you’d bring Rosie,” he says.

“It’s too close to her bedtime. She gets cranky.”

He accepts this, but I don’t. Bad mother, I tell myself. Wicked mother, keeping your baby from her father.

He could’ve said he wanted to see her, myself answers, and I chalk this up as a point for her.

Neither of the people physically present at the table has said anything for a while now.

“You’re the one who wanted to talk,” he says. “So talk.”

“I don’t know what to tell anyone,” I say. “Why are we doing this?”

He talks. After a length of time I don’t measure, I realize I’m not getting an answer, but I let him talk anyway. I study his face for rashes, although I don’t suppose this is the part of his anatomy I should check.

“Forget it,” I say. “Let’s talk about child support.”

He talks about bills and the mortgage on the house I don’t live in anymore. He says I’m going to have to go back to work.

“You think I don’t know that?” I say. “Of course I know that. But if you think I can support Rosie alone—”

We argue about child support and his spending habits and my spending habits, and about health insurance, the size of his paycheck, the size of my paycheck in the job I don’t even have yet, and whose idea it was that I not go back to work after Rosie was born. We argue about how much I spend on groceries.

He used to tease me for buying generic, and I did stop, although for some stuff, I swear, the only difference is the price. He coached me to buy 100 percent cotton percale when we shopped for sheets, organic when I shopped for food, microbrew when I shopped for beer.

He was worth it. We were worth it.

I, however, am not worth it.

We don’t mention credit cards.

The boy with the pierced lip and the bar code is staring at us.

“Can you keep your voice down?” I say to Thad.

A woman sitting two tables away turns to stare at me and I lower my own voice and whisper, “Can you keep your voice down?”

We reach a temporary agreement about child support and I ask if he can give me some money to tide me over. This will symbolize his commitment and let me be honest and aboveboard and never use the credit card again, although I don’t tell him this since he doesn’t know I’ve been using it.

He says he didn’t expect, and in any case he didn’t bring—

I remind him of the existence of cash machines.

We argue about the state of his bank account. I don’t mention microbrews, although maybe I should.

He hands me twenty dollars from his wallet and I shove it into my purse, alongside the wedding ring and the credit card, which is back from the kind of retirement people have when they discover their pension fund was invested in nonfat mortgage-backed securitized whatever they were called. Sold by Bernie Madoff.

When I walk to the door, everyone’s eyes follow me—I can feel them without having to look—and I lock my own eyes straight ahead until I get to the car, where I sit behind the wheel and burst into tears.

Thad walks by without seeming to notice me, and then he drives past, steering with one hand and holding the phone to his ear with the other. I follow him until he pulls into the parking lot of a small restaurant. Through the window, I see a candle glowing on every table.

I am consumed by hate. This burns calories even more efficiently than nursing.

I drive to my parents’ house.

My mother says, “I didn’t even know where to put my grandbaby to sleep—”

Rosie’s asleep on the living room rug. I pick her up and she melts into me without waking.

“You have got to get a crib for this child,” my mother says.

“She has a crib.”

“Not here, she doesn’t.”

I kiss the top of her head.

“Isn’t she gorgeous?” I say.

“She’ll fall out of bed and be retarded.”

“I’ll bring it over, okay? I’ll bring it this weekend.”

I wash Rosie and take her to bed with me and try to read, but I can’t concentrate.

I turn off the light, but in the dark I see restaurant candles glowing through the window.

What I should have done was let Thad get settled, then walk in to see who he was meeting. She’d be thin and beautiful, with a black dress and a sleek silver necklace. Or she’d be ordinary looking. She’d be younger than me, and thinner. Or older and more sophisticated. Someone more from Thad’s background.

For all I know about this new Thad, she could be a he. She could be the underage babysitter, except we never had a babysitter because we never went out together after Rosie was born.

Except tonight, which doesn’t count.

I turn on the light and try to read. I turn off the light and try to sleep.

I listen to my parents get ready for bed. The red numbers change on the clock. I try to imagine that none of this has happened.

I get dressed, wrap the blanket around Rosie, and buckle her into her car seat while she screams. I sing “The Eensy Weensy Spider” while I drive.

She cries until she hiccups and then she sleeps.

I park across the street from the house Thad and I bought back when spending money was sexy. A car that isn’t Thad’s or mine is parked in the driveway. It’s one of those things with gold-colored lettering to let everyone know it’s expensive. She probably leases it and pays the lease with her credit card. She pays off the credit card with another credit card. She swallows the MasterCard to catch the Visa; she swallows the Visa to catch the American Express.

The windows of the house are dark. All they tell me is that no one’s playing Scrabble in there.

If I dropped a match in her gas tank, I could be gone before anyone even noticed me, but I don’t smoke so I don’t carry matches, which I deeply regret right now.

Eventually I get bored and drive back to my parents’ house. When I unbuckle Rosie from her car seat, she wakes up and cries. I walk up and down in the driveway, singing “Bye, baby bunting, Papa’s found a dumpling.”

After she screams herself to sleep, I sneak into the house and carry her to bed with me.

The red numbers change on the clock.

I try to sleep.

Right. I’m as likely to sleep as I am to grow feathers. I bite my pillow. I list everything Thad’s done wrong, and, when I’m done with that, I list everything I’ve done right.

The second list is much shorter than the first. The only thing I can think of is creating Rosie, and I can’t claim credit for that. It’s not like I designed her.

No one loves me. Except my parents, who more or less have to.

I have never felt as alone in the world as I do right now, in a single bed at my parents’ house.

I roll away from Rosie and, as quietly as I’m able, I weep.