Читать книгу The Divorce Diet - Ellen Hawley - Страница 12

DAY

7

Exercise: I lie in bed listening to my father gargle in the bathroom. Rosie says, “Mmm ba ba ba.” I press my ear to her chest and listen to her heartbeat.

You have to get up, I tell myself.

Why do I have to get up? myself asks.

To check your non-diet book, because if you don’t you will have started your non-diet for Thad, not for yourself.

I haul myself out of bed and check the book. Don’t eliminate all the foods you love from your diet, it says. Taking the joy out of eating will only set you up for failure. Look for foods that are both healthy and delicious.

Has she read her own recipes?

Still, it’s good advice. In order not to eliminate all the foods I love from my diet, I don’t read my meal plans.

Breakfast: coffee, black; 1 slice of dry white toast.

Exercise: I’m staring bleakly into my coffee cup when I’m ambushed by a memory—a kind of mental film clip—of Thad’s wrist as he poured himself a second cup of coffee in the morning, that perfect line from hand to wrist to arm. He always was nice to look at, for whatever that was worth.

My toast is as hard to swallow, suddenly, as denim.

I pretend to eat one bite of baby cereal and say, “Mmmm.”

I pretend to feed one bite of baby cereal to my father while he says, “Mmmm.”

I tell Rosie, “All the babies down the street ate their cereal today and they can already talk, and you know what they say? They say, ‘Hey, Mama, gimme some more of that baby cereal,’ that’s what they say.”

Rosie flaps her arms. When I move the spoon toward her mouth, she turns her head.

Snack: 1 bowl of baby cereal.

Exercise: I open the classifieds and eliminate the jobs in accounting, nursing, plumbing, and brain surgery. I eliminate the HVAC jobs because I have no idea what HVAC stands for.

Rosie grabs for the classifieds. I pull them away, open her fist, and pry loose a strip of paper with most of the A’s.

I scoop a small wad of the A’s from her mouth.

My mother pads in barefoot and pours herself a cup of coffee. She’s wearing a pair of my father’s old pajamas, and if her hand and wrist make a perfect line with her arm as she pours, it’s hidden by a striped cotton-poly sleeve.

The person I want to become doesn’t care what her mother wears when she eats breakfast in her own kitchen.

I eliminate all the jobs listed on the small section of classifieds I scooped out of Rosie’s mouth because they’ve turned to moosh and all the remaining jobs because I don’t have the competence, the training, the interest, or the qualifications, pick as many reasons as you like.

The real jobs are on the Internet anyway.

I turn on the Food Channel and nurse Rosie. She has Thad’s beautiful eyebrows, and I trace them with my finger. If I hadn’t met Thad, Rosie wouldn’t exist, and I experience a moment of profound gratitude for my bad judgment.

I don’t cry, although I could. Easily.

I open the classifieds again and stare blankly at the paper.

“I never thought my life would work out this way,” I tell my father.

He’s sitting in his vinyl recliner, which has a slit in one side where my friend ran into it with a sharp stick when we were both too old to be fooling around like that.

The person I want to become doesn’t care.

He sets the paper down and says, “Sorry, what’d you say?”

“Nothing that matters.”

I circle a random sampling of office and restaurant jobs, since I can’t find anything under gourmet. I can’t think of any word in English that starts with A and means gourmet, but even so I’m convinced that the only job I want is on the paper I rescued from Rosie’s mouth.

I try to flatten it, but it rips.

I ask my mother for advice about day care.

I interrupt to argue with her advice about day care.

“Why’d you ask if you were just going to disagree?” she says.

“Let’s just not talk about it, okay?”

“Fine,” she says. “Shut me off like the water tap.”

I stalk to the car, wrestle the stroller out of the trunk, and take Rosie for a long walk.

Lunch: grease McBurger; small fries; remorse.

Exercise: I walk home and apologize to my mother, then apologize again, this time trying not to make it sound like it was her fault.

Before we get in any deeper, I retreat to my bedroom and stand staring at the pieces of the crib. Tab T fits into slot S, and I place bolt B in hole H while tab T2, on the opposite end of crib rail CR, whacks into wall W, which my mother painted last year, leaving a mark. I tighten nut N on bolt B, hold washer W in palm of hand P of H, and wonder where the hell it’s supposed to go. Not to mention what it does once it gets there.

If I’d known when I first assembled the crib that Thad would turn out to be a jerk, I would have saved the instructions.

I set washer W on top of dresser D. To hell with the crib. It’ll be here later.

I lay Rosie on the floor for a nap and check my diet book, because we all know what it means if I don’t.

Dinner is “Turkey and Pasta au Naturel.” It’s in quotation marks, but I read on. I’m supposed to sauté three ounces of nonfat turkey breast, a clove of garlic, and a tablespoon of broken glass in a quarter cup of defatted chicken broth.

I call for my invisible guru. She doesn’t answer, but she’s sneaky and may be skulking around silently, so I explain as simply as I’m able that sautéing is something you can only do in fat—not water, not broth, not toothpaste. If you sauté something in broth, you’re not sautéing it: You’re boiling it, you’re poaching it, you’re simmering it, or you’re drowning it, but you are not sautéing it.

She’s not interested. I’m overweight and she weighs 000.0, so she knows more than I do. Besides, she wrote a book. What have I done to match that?

Never mind. I’ve looked at the book, so my diet-related responsibilities are over for the day.

I check for food-related jobs online, but they’re replicas of what I found in the paper, so I type up a cover letter for the office jobs I circled:

“I have seen offices on television all my life and have a powerful desire to work in one. I have been physically present in several offices and frequently handle paper without supervision.”

I delete the document.

“I have no qualifications whatsoever for this job, but I need the money.”

I flush the document.

“My estranged husband works in an office and looks very nice in a white shirt.”

I insert a stick of virtual dynamite and blow the document to pixels.