Sex and Bacon (25 page)

I was just glad to have my father back. Handing him individual paper towels folded neatly into squares, I forgave him with all my heart.

WHEN PEOPLE GIVE
me expensive cheeses as hostess gifts, I serve the cheeses immediately (breathing shallowly as I dissect them, it’s true) and then slide the leftovers right into the garbage, once my guests have gone home.

In restaurants and at dinner parties, I’ve learned to feign lactose-intolerance or self-righteous veganism, depending on whether the rest of my meal includes animal parts or not. In a city like Seattle, not a single person questions my dietary strictures. My refusal of cheese goes unchallenged and unquestioned. My
no
always means
no
, and my voice is clear and firm.

Nowadays, when I refuse to put something in my mouth, nobody is ever unwise enough to argue.

I FEEL LIKE A FAILURE. LIKE A BIG FAKER.

I’m writing a book primarily about the sensual things I love—food, sex, women’s bodies,
my
body—and I’m hungry and scared and broke. These days, the closest I come to gracious living is paging through the glossy lifestyle magazines at my gym. It’s like writing a book on travel by looking at pictures of exotic countries on the Internet.

I’m feeling screwed over and sorry for myself, and I’m sick of pretending I’m living simply and elegantly when in reality, my refrigerator is empty, my last meal was boiled potatoes with salt and pepper, and I had to cut the multiple eyes and rotten spots out of the spuds before I could cook them. I’m tired of filling up on what’s here. I want to pick at something expensive and savory for a change. I’m writing a book on sex and food, and I haven’t been laid in a month and I can’t afford groceries.

This strikes me as the blackest of all possible humors.

The tiny paycheck I receive from my part-time word-processing job twice a month was spent a week ago. I’m staring down the barrel of next month’s rent and all I can do about that is pray.

I pray that I’ll be able to pay for a place to live for another month—that I can somehow make something out of nothing and have a few dollars left over for food, too. For six months I’ve been a magician: I tap my hat and out springs just enough money to pay a bill—$40 here, $20 there—but at this point, my stage patter’s getting old and my trusty hat’s as piebald as a mangy old stray. I’m never entirely solvent. My money-fu is more like triage: I just pay the bill that’s screaming the loudest or has been ignored the longest.

My laptop is dying.

Please, God, just let me finish this book
.

It’s amazing how much poor people pray—I find myself doing it constantly. Apparently poor people have God on speed-dial. All I know is that I’m praying, praying, praying, and my prayers used to be for things like an end to global misogyny and a renewed interest in solar power, and now I’m praying
Please, God
,
let cut-up fryers dtill be on dale for $1 a pound
and
Please, God, let me be a good enough creative writer to finish this book without anyone knowing I’ve been eating Top Ramen for a week straight
.

God’s probably sick of my constant calling—I don’t blame Him for letting His machine pick up instead.
Your call is very Important to Us
. I know He’s lying, but I stay on the line and leave piteous little messages anyway.

I FEEL LIKE
my poverty is really testing the thesis of this book—that everyone has a right to good food,
no matter what
. “No matter what” means no matter if the Y key is sticking or if I haven’t paid my electric bill in full since last spring. “No matter what” means no excuses—even in the thickest midst of my poverty and depression I have to find a -way to give myself good, nourishing food. Because if I don’t, who ‘will? And if I don’t, how can I prove that I love myself enough to make changes in an untenable situation? And how will I attain the energy or will to make those changes?

I think the whole idea hinges on sifting out the things you can actually control.

Because Lord knows I can’t control this fucking Y key, and I can’t control next month’s rent, and I’ve got a two-inch reverse skunk stripe of Crazy Lady black roots on my dyed-blond hair that I can’t afford to control either, so you know I’m not at what you might call, My Personal Best.

But:

If my dinner tonight is more boiled potatoes, well, so be it. Potatoes kept my Irish ancestors alive for generations —I guess they’re good enough for my pale Irish ass. Throw some cheap whiskey on top of those potatoes, and you’ve got a two-course meal. Pare a few onions into the potato-boiling water, and you’ve got your salad course. How fancy do you want to get, anyway?

I can either eat those potatoes and hate them and feel angry and miserable and screwed, or I can eat the potatoes and do my best to taste what’s delicious about them, and let them nourish me, and be thankful for them. Either way I’m probably supping on potatoes. The only difference is what side dish I choose: Self-pity is certainly one choice, but the better one might possibly be a little humility. Because as bad as things are, at least I’m eating
something
. And my laptop’s still mostly working, despite the wonky Y key.

I shouldn’t be using so many adverbs anyway. My verbs need to toughen up and start pulling their own weight. We all have to pitch in these days.

IT TURNS OUT
that tonight for dinner I’m having a can of tuna and a piece of bread. Tuna was on sale and the bread was cheap. Tuna for protein and bread for bulk—it’s not cut-up fryers for a buck a pound, but it’s better than another package of salt-flavored noodles.

I think it’s easy to live a lush life when you have every resource at your fingertips. But maybe part of what I’m supposed to be writing about is taking pleasure in the small things that are easy to overlook—like a simple dinner, eaten alone, in a peaceful apartment. Maybe my craving for rich food and luxury has been so loud that I’ve missed the small, quiet voice of appreciation for what I do have.

So tonight I’ll put my fish dinner on a bright, pretty plate. I’ll toast the bread. I’ll fix myself a glass of water, with ice cubes and a straw. I’ll add freshly ground pepper to my tuna and maybe drizzle some olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the top to add depth of flavor. I’ll sit at my kitchen table with a good book. And I will deliberately enjoy every bite of my meal, noticing and appreciating every nuance of flavor, aroma, and texture. I will pretend I’ve never had tuna and bread before in my life, and I’m trying to write an essay describing my delicious meal for
Gourmet
magazine. I will insist upon pleasure, because if that’s the only thing I can control, I want as much of it as I can get.

I’m going to try something else after dinner, too: I’m going to speed-dial God and when His machine clicks on, I’m just going to say
Thanks
. I figure He might appreciate hearing something besides
It’s not fair
and
Why can’t I have
and
Please, just kill me now
. You gotta keep ‘em guessing, even when they’re omnipotent—He only gave us free will to see what kind of crazy shit we’d be up to, and I, for one, hate to disappoint.

HEARTBREAK 1:
WHEN YOU CAN’T STAND TO EAT

MY HEART IS BROKEN. I THINK I ACTUALLY HEARD IT CRACK.

It sounded like a wishbone: a dry snap. When I was growing up and my mom roasted chicken for dinner, my brother and I would set the wishbone on the kitchen windowsill to parch. After a few days, giggling, we’d make wishes and pull it apart. Whoever got the bigger half of the bone got his or her wish. I usually wished that boys would like me, or that I’d wake up one morning to find myself miraculously slim and beautiful and popular.

Unfortunately, I stayed toadish and unlovable through high school no matter how many roast chickens my mom made. I watched other teens date on TV, marveling at the handsome boys who drove cars and wore khaki pants and actually asked girls out to restaurants and movies, paying for them and casually holding their coats over one arm. I wasn’t even jealous: It was like watching African tribal mating rituals on the Discovery Channel, as unreal and fascinating as science fiction.

Now that I live alone, I don’t bother to save and dry my wishbones. Who would I break them with, anyway? That would be like thumb-wrestling myself—half of me would win, the other half would lose. Those odds aren’t exactly inspiring. So now I just throw my bones away—it’s better to be without wishes than to be a constant half-loser.

MY HEART BROKE
a few nights ago while I was trying to find the gentle, sensible phrases that would keep my man from walking out on me.

We’d had an argument. It escalated. I knew he was tired and hungry. I thought that if I made us a meal and he slept over that night, we could resolve our spat in the morning. He, on the other hand, was angrily packing his belongings into the plastic grocery sacks he retrieved from the cabinet beneath my sink.
He knows where everything is in my apartment
, I thought.
Doesn’t that mean something?

In my hesitation and misplaced pride, desperately tongue-tied, I waited too long to speak and the moment passed me by. It was over. He grabbed his coat and slammed the door behind him—just like in the movies. It was very confusing—it had all happened so fast! One moment I was a girlfriend . . . then all of a sudden, I wasn’t.

Can he just do that?
I wondered.
I mean . . . really?

The answer shot back immediately:
Not only
can
he, sister
—
he just
did.

I scanned the apartment frantically. He’d left his coffee press and a pile of books! That had to mean something, that he’d be back—didn’t it?

But before I could even indulge myself in a moment of optimism, Negativity arrived on the scene like an ambulance-chasing lawyer.
Nope!
came the first response, delivered in a tone so positive it was almost gleeful.

He’s done with you
, another voice added savagely. I imagined a hateful old woman pressing her lips together and nodding her head—
Done with you, slut!

I was only distracted momentarily by the sound of his car starting outside before hearing a discreet interior
pop!
It sounded like a nonmicrowaveable plate undone by the rigors of low-grade kitchen radiation: a tiny explosion in a plastic box. My heart—the fist-size muscle that I’d always imagined as ruby red and robust—had turned out to be as brittle as an old chicken bone left too long on a kitchen windowsill.

Instead of wishing and half-losing, I’d held back and lost everything.

Now there are shards and mess everywhere. I find fragments of broken plate and bone in every bite of food I try to swallow. They stick in my throat and make me bleed.

I’M LOOKING ON
the bright side, trying to be a half-winner for once.

If the diet pill industry could bottle the appetite-reducing power of heartbreak, every obese person in America would be stick-thin—even skinless chicken breasts and steamed vegetables don’t melt weight off as quickly as misery. I can rub the knobs of my own hip bones above my belt. Unfortunately my face appears mummified from all the crying. A few times I’ve woken up in the morning with dried-blood tracks running from my tear ducts all the way to my jaw line. I can’t explain them except to posit that it’s a miracle, like a weeping statue of the Virgin Mary.

I suppose the blood could be from the broken blood vessels around my eyes. Each tiny hemorrhage calls attention to the brand-new under-eye bags I’m suddenly sporting. For the first time in my life, I look my age.

In the mirror I am dismayed to see the hateful old woman who told me my man wouldn’t be back, and every day her mouth gets tighter and meaner. Her skin is dry and flaky, like piecrust. When I blink sadly, she blinks. Her eyelids are scaly and reptilian. She is a wicked thing—chewing on hair and splinters, spitting out rat poison.
Nobody loves you, whore
, she says merrily, just for the mean fun of it. When I cry her eyes glisten like wet rocks.