Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (28 page)

At the New Year’s Eve party, the pinpricks I made concerned how much he liked to spend money. His salary went up and up, and he charted that progress in cars, wine, nice jewelry for Sylvia and extensive home renovations. He could be showy, and on this night, as I sloshed through a third martini, I called him on it. I asked him if he and Sylvia now owned four cars or three. I asked him how many pairs of cuff links he had amassed.

I didn’t see the color rising in his face until it was too late.

“Well, Frank,” he said, pausing for a loaded moment, “at least I’m not fat.”

Sylvia, standing within arm’s reach of us, looked away. Adelle, also nearby, studied her shoes. The words hung there, heavier than me, and the silence in their wake stretched on and on, surrounding us like some ghastly bubble, beyond which I could hear the muffled strains of the party’s music and laughter.

I had to get away.

I turned, walked out of the club’s main dining room and hustled down the first staircase I found. I had some vague knowledge from the past that there were little-used hallways and bathrooms and locker rooms below ground level: hiding places. I wanted to be somewhere no one could see me. I needed to be invisible, because what I felt right then was hideously and horribly exposed.

So: they’d noticed. The whole family had noticed. And there was something in the what-the-hell, screw-the-tact tone of Harry’s insult that suggested that they’d also been marveling for some time at my deterioration, discussing it, probably even cautioning one another not to mention it to me, because they all knew how sensitive I could be when it came to my weight and weren’t sure how to nudge me in a healthier direction without sending me into a tailspin. They were pitying me, and what I felt now, as my stomach cratered and my heart jackhammered, was pitiful.

I started crying. In a far corner of a back hallway in an unfamiliar basement, I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes to try to stanch my tears and I pressed my lips together to try to muffle any sound. I couldn’t control the violent rising and falling of my chest, the whistling intakes of breath. I thought about Mom—couldn’t
stop
thinking about Mom. Although she more than anyone else in the family would have hated seeing me like this, I wanted her here, needed her here, needed someone unafraid to ask me what the hell was going on and tell me I was in trouble and be able to do both without breaking me. If she’d been around, would I have let myself go? If she’d been present, would the impulse to do so have been so strong in the first place?

After ten minutes I found a bathroom, splashed cold water on my face and stood at the mirror, waiting for the wildness in my eyes to dim, for my nose to stop running, for my breathing to even out. I recognized this drill from those college days when I answered binges with purges. Here I was, more than fifteen years further down the road, and still I hadn’t found a steady way to navigate it. Still I was lurching and swerving and scraping the rails.

When I rejoined the party, I stayed away from Harry, because I owed him an apology and didn’t want to give it, and because he owed me one and I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted the whole incident forgotten. If we revisited it, even obliquely, we’d just be giving it staying power.

I knew that the surest way to lose the shame I was feeling was to lose some weight. But the hell of it was that I’d never been in circumstances that made that more difficult. By January 2000, the Bush campaign had entered the phase in which reporters no longer forged their own paths in following the candidate. Instead they lashed themselves to the candidate’s entourage. That entourage assumed control of their lodging and their transport.

That entourage also assumed control of their feeding.

The advent of eating is the crack of dawn. That’s when the first of the day’s many meals comes along, and it’s no off-the-cuff, on-the-go improvisation. It’s an upsized, deconstructed Denny’s Grand Slam, sausages in one steaming metal warming bin, bacon in another, a viscous ocean of scrambled eggs here, leaning towers of pancakes there. The bins fan out along the wall of a hotel banquet room, its air humid in a way that’s particular to the presence of enough cholesterol for at least two hundred people. Those of us in the press pack shadowing the candidate number no more than seventy.

We descend on the room for “baggage call,” the appointed hour for handing our luggage to campaign aides in time to have it loaded onto the campaign plane for the first flight of the day. The baggage-call deadline is as many as ninety minutes before we ourselves must board one of the buses for the airport, and during this interminable wait we rummage through newspapers and marinate ourselves in caffeine at round tables within perilous olfactory reach of those bins. We breathe in the heady, greasy, piggy perfume of an unhealthy breakfast for the taking. Is it any wonder that I take it? That I allow myself a few spoonfuls of eggs to settle my stomach from the martinis last night, and maybe one link of sausage because I adore sausage and maybe a second link because it’s going to be another epic, agitating day of multiple time zones and mind-numbing dictation, and I need and deserve just a small dose of happiness, don’t I? Just a soupçon? Aren’t some rendered, cased, spiced pig parts my due?

The second meal comes on the plane, no more than forty-five minutes after the end of the first. It’s more eggs, more sausage, some cornflakes, a banana, white toast, a blueberry muffin, butter, jam. All of this is compressed onto one awesomely engineered tray, a geometric marvel of calories per square inch, delivered by a flight attendant who’s fleet and insistent and above all sneaky, because she shimmies the tray into a nook of space beside my laptop before I notice her and wave her away. I was going to wave her away, I really was. But now the tray and food are right here, right under my nose and my chins, ready and waiting for me to get distracted or curious. It happens. And . . . wow, these sausages are possibly better—meatier, fattier, oilier—than the ones back at the hotel. I’ll need another taste for a proper determination.

The third meal comes around eleven thirty a.m. It’s the first of two lunches, and it’s in yet another hotel banquet room, this one in the new city to which we’ve flown for the morning speech on tax cuts or educational standards or the privatization of Social Security. The speech is done, we’re typing up our notes or stories, we may need nourishment. We’re in a Southwestern state, so we’ve been given a Southwestern spread: enchiladas, quesadillas, guacamole. I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they’re either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

Wheels up. Back in the air. And back to eating: The flight attendants are passing out Lunch No. 2, which is Meal No. 4. It’s a modest sandwich deal, the least tempting spread of the day so far, but the attendants pass out, for dessert, these Dove chocolate-covered ice cream bars, and they pass them out in a manner so persuasive I’m wondering if they moonlight as Hollywood recruiters for the Church of Scientology. The ice cream bars look delicious. Since I skipped the sandwich, I don’t skip this.

Another landing. Another city. Another speech. Another hotel banquet or meeting room in which to set up our laptops and hunker down to work. No food this time around, because it’s past lunchtime and well before dinnertime and the schedule is especially hurried during this later phase of the day. I have seventy minutes to write a daily story on what Governor Bush stated or didn’t state or misstated—his malapropisms are legendary, and never go out of style—and must spend the first fifty minutes transcribing the tape. So it’s a panting, praying, slam-bang, slapdash type-type-type deadline situation, and by the time I’m back on the plane yet again, being shepherded yet again toward the grubby seat stained by all the greedy eating I’ve done in it, I’m all nerves. Praise the lord and pass the Gouda: the charter company has laid out a cheese tray! With crackers. And chicken fingers and fried jalapeño poppers and of course beer or wine, take your pick. It’s a happy hour’s worth of fried bar snacks for an hour that didn’t start out so happy. If we count this as a meal, and I think we must, it’s No. 5.

No. 6 is served to us in our seats as we fly at night to be in place for the event tomorrow morning, when we’ll wake somewhat later than usual, since we’ll already be in place and won’t have to begin the day by traveling. We can choose chicken or steak, salad dressing A or B: your basic airplane routine, only the portions are bigger and the food better, in fact just better enough to seduce a weary, besieged political reporter whose happy hour cheese consumption was compromised by calls from editors about a little nugget of information heard on CNN and about a big thought that someone high on the paper’s masthead wanted to see reflected in the day’s story—and, if it’s not too much trouble, could I help one colleague by getting a quote from the Bush campaign about the capital gains tax and another colleague by getting a quote about doping in professional sports and another colleague, this one in the Style department, about whether Laura Bush has a favorite handbag? On the campaign plane we’re allowed to use our cell phones all the way through takeoff, and the calls don’t stop coming until the plane rises too high in the air for my phone to maintain its connection, at which point pausing to eat just a bit of that chicken or steak isn’t an act of unconscionable overindulgence. It’s a hard-earned, meditative turn away from the pressures of the day. It’s akin to a moment of prayer.

A seventh meal is still to come. Two senior Bush strategists have agreed to a long off-the-record conversation over food and drinks with me and an ABC News producer with whom I work closely, and that means we’re buying them a big dinner in a decent steakhouse, because a big dinner in a decent steakhouse is the best way to make sure they’ll agree to another long off-the-record conversation down the road. We all meet at about eight p.m., and what follows is the whole works: the martinis, the iceberg wedges with blue cheese, the porterhouses, the potatoes, the red wine. All stomachs having limits, even mine doesn’t permit the kind of consumption that would be possible if I had steered clear of food since lunches No. 1 and No. 2. But it makes a valiant effort in the spirit of not dragging down the table’s mood or distracting the strategists from the scuttlebutt they’re giving up. It holds up through the cheesecake. It finally gets its reprieve at ten forty-five p.m.

At the bar on the ground floor of the hotel where the campaign is staying for the night, several of the best reporters assigned to the campaign are gathered, as are several of the workers in the press department of the campaign itself. There’s only one responsible thing to do: join them. The reporters will be tossing around what they deem to be their most incisive observations and thus divulging what they know and what they plan to report. The campaign workers may get a little loose-lipped. So it’s another few glasses of wine before midnight, and maybe, while drinking them, some peanuts grabbed absentmindedly from a bowl, but not so many peanuts that they constitute what would be Meal No. 8. The count stands at seven.

That wasn’t an utterly typical day on the campaign trail. But it wasn’t wholly atypical, either.

From the campaign’s perspective, a well-fed press corps was an upbeat, docile press corps, so campaign officials made whatever arrangements necessary to ensure that we’d be fattened like Angus steers. Meanwhile the charter company that ran the planes had to justify the astronomical sums it was charging all of our news organizations for our passage, so it laid on the canapés, desserts and snacks. And the hotels that filled the banquet halls or meeting rooms with buffets for us knew that they were serving the traveling news media, so they saw every steroidal spare rib or cheese-mummified nacho they laid out as a marketing and publicity effort.

Not all the reporters got fat. For every one who gained weight there was another who found some way—often eccentric, sometimes extreme—to keep it off. One young female television producer was so appalled at the ten to fifteen pounds she put on in the first months of the campaign that she stopped eating altogether, and by the last months of the campaign her hair had started falling out.

A wire service reporter trying to wring some order from this chaotic food universe decided to eat only foods of a given color on a given day, an approach that sounded relatively straightforward until it was put into play. Was a banana yellow (the peel) or white (the edible fruit)? Was an egg white (the shell) or yellow (the yolk, as well as the results of scrambling)? Toward such weighty philosophical questions our worlds turned. A reporter could devote only so much thought, and so much conversation, to the pros and cons of lowering the capital gains tax.

I needed my own special strategy, something accommodated by the kinds of food typically available on the plane and on the ground, a regimen that would leave me with plenty to eat while limiting my calories enough to create the possibility of weight loss.

“Starting today,” I told John Berman, the ABC News producer, and Kevin Flower, a producer for CNN, “I’m a fruitarian.”

I didn’t know if the word even existed, but I liked the sound of it. I liked saying it. So as I commenced the transition into my new self—pear-focused rather than pear-shaped—I talked as much about it as possible. I resolved to turn deprivation into shtick. What I was giving up in protein and fat I would gain in self-amusement.

John was eating some scrambled eggs for breakfast.

“I always preferred my eggs over medium, or as an omelet, to scrambled,” I told him. “But that was before I became a fruitarian.”

Hours later, as I assembled a vivid hillock of pineapple slices and strawberries from one of the fruit plates that always seemed to accompany the sandwich spreads in hotel meeting rooms, Kevin asked me, “What life changes have you noticed since you became a fruitarian?”

“I’m definitely more alert as a fruitarian,” I told him. “I have more mental clarity. And as a fruitarian I have more energy.”