Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (14 page)

Into which category did Mom fall?

She and Dad came to visit sophomore year. Mom had seen Carolina before, when she’d dropped me off freshman year. Dad hadn’t. Mom had probably made him feel guilty about it, in accordance with one of the tried-and-true dynamics of their marriage. She would volunteer to relieve him of some burden concerning us children, then make him feel guilty about not being as attuned to our lives as she was. He would snap to, and she would gloat about having made that happen.

In a telephone conversation before their visit, she said to me, “Don’t mention it to him, but I told your father.” She didn’t need to be any more specific. This was the latest chapter in an ongoing and, by this point, comical saga titled, “Mom Takes Control of Frank’s Being Gay.”

She had figured out the truth about me shortly before my high school graduation, or rather she had read the truth about me in a letter from Ann that I had made the mistake of leaving out on my bedroom desk. (“I was cleaning your messy room because you never do,” Mom said, turning the tables so that she was the aggrieved party, “and the word ‘gay’ just
leapt
out at me.”) After her discovery she had told me that while she could deal with it, she wasn’t so sure about my siblings and father. She made me promise that I wouldn’t test them with this information just yet.

Then, during a phone conversation about a month into my freshman year, she announced: “I saw a window of opportunity, and I told your brother Mark.”

A few months after that, she had an update.

“There was a good moment,” she reported, “so I told your brother Harry.”

But she remained steadfast: Dad must not-not-not be told. Until, that is, she simply went ahead and told him, after which point she instituted a new rule. I must not-not-not force Dad to engage in an actual conversation about what he now knew.

In any case, Mom’s main alert in advance of their visit to Carolina sophomore year wasn’t about that. It was about her and Dad’s diets. They’d lost a lot of weight, she crowed.

They both looked significantly slimmer than when I’d seen them months before, and they had brought with them some of the little snacks and props to which they attributed their progress: that edible cardboard known as Wasa bread, which Mom convincingly pretended to enjoy, and some weird yellowish powder that the diet center they were attending recommended as a seasoning for vegetables and skinless, fatless meats. It was supposed to emulate salt and butter without transmitting their sins.

“Salt is
terrible
for you,” Mom said. We were in a restaurant on Franklin Street, a nicer, more expensive restaurant than the Chinese place or Sadlack’s or my other usual hangouts. She made a grand gesture of pushing the salt shaker to a far corner of the table. Dad’s eyes followed it as if he were watching a golf putt go astray or noticing that one of his stacked television-time Eskimo Pies had melted before he got to it.

“Just
terrible
for you,” Mom reiterated, and then she elaborated, as if answering a question I had not, in fact, asked.

“One, salt bloats you,” she explained. “Two, it makes you thirsty, and thirst can be confused with hunger, and in any case you wind up drinking or eating more than your body needs or even wants to. That’s why they have pretzels and salty nuts on bars. That’s why there’s so much salt in McDonald’s food.”

So she had banished salt. Well, she had
mostly
banished salt. This diet center she was attending also prohibited diet colas, on account of their sodium content, but telling Mom she couldn’t have diet colas was like telling an aardvark “no more ants.” It just wasn’t going to fly.

She had also taken up aerobics. This I’d seen firsthand during a recent visit home, because she’d lassoed me into going to a class with her, no doubt wanting an audience for the various leg kicks and abdomen crunches, at which she’d become shockingly adept. Even so, she was closing in on fifty, had carried and delivered four children and had ridden her own roller-coaster of weight gains and losses. It showed. And watching her do her squats and squeezes in a leotard—well, there are experiences even the closest of mothers and sons shouldn’t share.

We were indeed close, and she was indeed a sharer. When I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, she passed along steamy Sidney Sheldon novels and lurid serial-killer books as soon as she finished reading them, raving about what page-turners they were. We’d debate the relative merits of
The Other Side of Midnight
versus
The Stranger in the Mirror
versus
Bloodline
. When I was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, I made her take me to R-rated movies, and sometimes, during the sex scenes, she’d nudge me and tell me what she found plausible and what she didn’t.

We always argued over which movies we’d go to, she wanting something melodramatic and escapist, I wanting something gritty and “slice-of-life,” as the reviewers said.

“I don’t need slice-of-life,” she’d protest. “I
live
slice-of-life.” Her particular slice wasn’t one of noteworthy hardship, though Mom had always taken on so many volunteer assignments, done so many favors for our school classes and swim teams, typed up so many of our term papers and handled so much of Dad’s personal business that her days were crammed with obligations and deadlines. In fact, she usually had to limit herself to five hours of sleep in order to get her pulp fiction in.

During her and my father’s trip to Chapel Hill my sophomore year, she and I breached a new frontier in sharing: she actually tried to get me a date. She stayed on a few days longer than Dad, and she and I had lunch one afternoon at Pyewacket, a vegetarian restaurant where I’d been introduced to the glories of hummus. Mom and I ate a vegetarian lasagna, made with spinach noodles and a béchamel sauce. As we did, she noticed the way I was looking at our waiter.

She leaned across the table, motioned me to lean in, too, and whispered: “You think he’s cute, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Me, too,” she said. Mom loved stuff like this. She loved entering into conspiratorial modes and confidential pacts about topics normally outside the bounds of a parent-child relationship.

I started to lean back, figuring we were done. She motioned me forward anew.

“Is he?” she asked.

I played dumb. “Is he what?”

“You know,” she said. Although we were whispering, she was nonetheless wary of speaking the word “gay.” She may well have thought she was respecting my privacy; it would take her a long time to understand that I really didn’t care. But she also had objections to the way “gay” had become a synonym for “homosexual.” She occasionally complained that a once-innocuous term had been hijacked and turned into something freighted. And she sometimes refused to participate in that.

I thought about pressing on with my charade of confusion and making her utter the dread syllable, but I relented.

“I’m pretty sure he is,” I told her.

“How do you figure something like that out?” she asked.

“There are signs,” I said. “The sway in his walk. The floppy wrists.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“There are telltale birthmarks,” I said.

“I’m serious!” she protested. “How?”

“Every time our eyes met,” I said, “he held the gaze for a good four to six seconds. I figure anything over three seconds can’t be an accident. I figure the odds are very, very good that he doesn’t have a poster of Farrah Fawcett in a swimsuit on his bedroom wall.”

“But
you
once had a poster of Farrah Fawcett on
your
bedroom wall,” she reminded me.

“That was when she was an icon,” I explained, “and that was about her hair.”

Mom shook her head and sighed. Her children’s worlds confused her. My world in particular.

At the end of lunch, when she was about to pay the bill, she noticed that the restaurant’s credit card form had not only a line for a signature but also a line for a phone number—some sort of security measure. She pushed the form, the credit card and the pen toward me.

“You sign it,” she said. “That way you can write in your phone number. And he’ll have it, in case he wants to call.” She said all of this in an excited voice, immensely proud of herself.

I rolled my eyes, as if the possibility of a call from the waiter was immaterial to me and I deemed her little scheme ridiculous. I didn’t. Signing the form and writing out my number, I grew exhilarated at both the prospect that he might get in touch with me and at the goofiness of Mom having a role in it.

He never called. But the lunch at Pyewacket did have a payoff: Mom found a recipe for a vegetarian lasagna similar to the restaurant’s and started making it, though her version was cheesier, runnier—in sum, more caloric. I once came home from college to a whole pan of it. It was gone within two days. As good as it tasted warm, it tasted even better cold, around two a.m., slid quietly from its shelf in the refrigerator so that no one would know that I was still up, so that no one would know that I was still eating.

 

 

 

 

In my off-campus apartment that sophomore year I never made anything as ambitious as vegetarian lasagna. I never really cooked. I toasted bread for Swiss cheese sandwiches, which I slathered with mayonnaise, and I popped popcorn in butter-flavored Crisco, a method one of my two roommates taught me. These were my late-night snacks, the possible compensations for—or add-ons to—whatever food I’d avoided or surrendered to during the day.

It was a year of drift. I lost touch with emotional-fatigue Abigail, who sank deeper and deeper into the subculture of theater rats as I cast my lot with the would-be Woodwards, Trillins and Kaels at the newspaper. Jared was still good for weekend trips to the gay bar in Durham and for weeknight conversations about guys pursued, guys surrendered, guys beyond reach and guys spotted buying pore-minimizing makeup at the Clinique counter. But I saw less of him, too: he’d moved farther off campus than I had and made frequent trips home to a rural area in the southern part of the state.

As an English major I slogged wearily through
Beowulf
,
The Canterbury Tales
and
The Faerie Queen
. At the campus newspaper, I focused on writing editorials, promulgating opinions I didn’t know I had until I was called upon to have them. And, periodically, I ate too much, my vigilance waning, my willpower faltering, my waist expanding. I hadn’t replaced my aborted bike riding with a different form of regular exercise, and by the end of spring semester I was down to just two pairs of pants that fit me: burgundy corduroys, their color fading fast, and forest green corduroys, their color fading faster.

What awful timing. This wasn’t the summer to be fat, to look frumpy. The Morehead Foundation had arranged an internship for me in New York City, where I’d be working as a fact-checker and sometime reporter for writers at
Newsweek
magazine.
Newsweek
magazine! In New York City! I’d hobnob with real journalists, real
magazine writers
, writers whose names were known to millions of readers around the country, writers who granted movies their acclaim and books their best-seller status and politicians their moments of glory. At night, I wouldn’t be hunkered down with Jennifer Beals at a suburban multiplex. I’d be lining up outside exclusive nightclubs. I’d be seeing Broadway plays.

And I’d be doing all of this, it seemed, in burgundy or forest green corduroys.

What
now
? Buying new pants was out of the question, because that would mean buying bigger pants, and
that
would mean reconciling myself to a heavier, broader me, and the heavier, broader me would be gone in a week, wouldn’t it? I’d do a three-day fast, and I’d do it better than I had with Beth during senior year at Loomis. Or maybe a two-day fast. Or at least a juice fast, every other day. Or five straight days of protein-powder shakes, with no ice cream in them and no peanut butter, or only a tablespoon.

But for the first month of my internship at
Newsweek
, before I crammed into a Downtown Manhattan loft with six other Carolina students doing summer internships in the city, I commuted to Midtown Manhattan from White Plains, where I stayed with Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn. And Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn did what Brunis playing host to guests always do, even if the guest is a close family member who ostensibly doesn’t need to be impressed, and even if the guest doesn’t budge for nearly a month. They fed me, constantly and lavishly.

Taking a page from Grandma, Aunt Carolyn did much of her serious cooking in a separate kitchen that she had installed in the basement of her house. It was there she would go, this blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American girl from a farm in Indiana, to dredge chicken cutlets through bread crumbs and Parmesan and then lower them into sizzling oil. The cutlets would be waiting for me when I returned from a day at
Newsweek
, and they were better than Grandma’s, better than Mom’s, though I kept mum about that. I was a glutton, not an imbecile.

Aunt Carolyn had asked my mother for the recipes of some of my favorite dishes, and she made them for me: chicken divan, beef Stroganoff. Uncle Mario would open a bottle of red wine, and after a glass or two, I’d have an easier time convincing myself that a third helping of the chicken wasn’t such a bad idea. Grandma might drop by, or we’d pay her a visit: the drive was about ten minutes. On those occasions the quantity of food expanded, because neither Aunt Carolyn nor Grandma could let the other woman run away with the show.

My corduroys were getting snugger, and they were still all I had. I would march into
Newsweek
—into these offices filled with writers whose work I revered and whose approval I craved—in the burgundy corduroys on Tuesday, the forest green corduroys on Wednesday, the burgundy corduroys again on Thursday, and so on. With them I wore ridiculously blousy button-downs so that the way the corduroys cinched my love handles wasn’t so obvious. And I walked hurriedly past mirrors, to avoid any visual confirmation of my worst fears.