The Husband Diet (A Romantic Comedy) (4 page)

Chapter 3:

Stage Four?

“D
ump him!” my best friend Paul exclaimed as we lugged our delicatessen food home. Freshly baked
ciabatta
with oregano, stuffed peppers, baked potatoes with rosemary, veal
involtini
simmered in white
Inzolia
wine and my favorite,
tiramisù
. Take
that
to the bank, Ira.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said as I hefted the bags and inhaled the marvelous fragrances, already envisaging a revenge feast. Well, maybe a goodbye-to-food dinner, kind of like my own version of The Last Supper or something.

“
Too tired to make the effort. Blown to a size twenty. As if he was Brad friggin’ Pitt!”
Paul scoffed.
“I can’t believe it. What am I saying? Of
course
I believe it. That little shit is capable of anything.”

Every week the same story—Paul telling me to dump my husband and me biding my time, waiting for a miracle to happen. Only now I knew it wasn’t just his hectic work life sapping the strength out of him that made him always cranky. It was my fat ass.

He no longer saw me as he used to and it was true I’d gone a long way down from the young, preppy, free-spirited and sexy girl I used to be. At least I had been before the kids. Ira couldn’t understand why I’d never lost the baby weight. Fact was it wasn’t just the baby weight. It was the doughnut weight, the apple pie weight, the
tiramisù
. It had nothing to do with the baby fat.

Yes, I’d packed it back on after Warren and Maddy were born, but I was simply returning to my old (big) self that Ira hadn’t seen before because he’d met me during my two-year stint of slimness when I had been a size fourteen. And even then he’d had something to say about it. He’d told me I was pretty, but that I’d needed to lose just a tiny bit of weight.

Lose weight? What a joke. Ira didn’t understand me. I was born hungry and nothing could fill me. I liked to blame my mother for never loving me the way she loved Judy and Vince, my siblings. I liked to blame my love for cooking, or
Le Tre Donne
, my aunts’ Italian restaurant. Or even the desserts section at my local supermarket. But in truth, eating made me happy. It comforted me and made me feel like everything was all right. And up until then I hadn’t given a damn about my weight. Inside I was still me. And I still managed to dress nicely thanks to the Plus Size sections in Macy’s.

But it was soon becoming obvious to me, once my pink shades had dropped off my nose, that the weight was starting to really weigh me down. I was a busy working mom who could never go fast enough, with never a moment to spare, always running late, always dropping things on the way to the car and wheezing when I bent to pick them up. Of course, if I lost some weight I could actually keep up with the kids and face anything they threw my way.

Who knows, maybe I was hoping I’d lose weight out of sheer force of concentration and become this irresistible woman that Ira couldn’t
help
but make love to. Because dieting was hard. I was always too hungry and there was always amazing food around me. If I didn’t have time to bake it or go back to Little Italy, there was always the shop around the corner.

“I’d say you’re at Stage Four,” Paul diagnosed, which, according to his scale of one to five in troubled relationships, was just before divorce.

“Nonsense; we’re just in a rut.”

“And you’re in denial.”

“Is it really because I’m big?” I asked. Ira had spelled it out to me but it still hurt to believe.

He shot me a skeptical glance. “Sunshine, only a real man deserves a real woman. That’s my official version. My real opinion is Ira’s always been a shit.”

“That’s not true,” I countered. When we’d met, Ira was different. He was sexy, alluring, with so many goals in life. “He doesn’t even want to go to Tuscany anymore.”

Paul had been helping me trawl for farmhouses through an Italian connection of his in Siena, but so far nothing was affordable. He’d suggested settling for a normal house in the country, but I’d put my foot down. No more settling for me. I wanted the real deal.

“Doesn’t want to go to Tuscany?” Paul echoed. “The guy is beyond helpless. What are you waiting for to split the scene?”

I stopped to admire the doughnuts in the bakery window. Paul tugged on my arm. “Sunshine,
no
.”

I cast a longing look at him, my best friend, the one person I could chew the breeze and be myself with, something we rarely did around anyone else.

“Just one,” I pleaded. It had been ages. Well, two days, really. Oh, the chocolate glaze! “What’s one measly doughnut? Besides—whose side are you on? Why can’t I be big and be loved all the same? You love me.”

“Sunshine,” Paul said. “I love you, but I’m never gonna have sex with you. You
know
I don’t do women.”

“If you weren’t gay, would you? Do me?”

Paul chuckled. “And you need to ask? Of course I would.”

“Even though I’m big?” I insisted.

“Of course! You’re beautiful—like the Renaissance women, soft and squeezable. Who wouldn’t want you?”

“Then don’t give me a hard time if I want a doughnut.”

Paul looked at me, his eyes shining with what I knew was compassion, and sighed. “All right, but only if you promise to leave him.”

“Paul! All I want is a damn doughnut.”

“And all I want is for you to be happy. Erica, you can’t go on like this. The kids can’t go on like this. You need to send him to hell once and for all.”

As if it was easy. I remember the old Ira and our evenings together, having a quiet dinner and a chat on the sofa. More often than not we’d take it from the sofa to the bedroom. Now there was nothing much left to take anywhere. The person I’d become, although I kept a roof over his head and food in his belly, had
disappointed
him.

I hoped he was just going through a phase. Because I couldn’t stand it. And if I couldn’t stand by my man in his time of need, then we were toast. I’d promised to love and cherish him. For the sake of our marriage. For the sake of our children. I could deal with it. If I ran a leviathan like The Farthington, I should be able to do everything, including saving my marriage. Provided I still wanted to.

Sometimes I wished I could just... wiggle my nose and make him disappear. Or at least make him change. But that was not happening. He’d spoken his mind. The die had been cast. It was lose weight or lose him, live in Boston or go to Tuscany on my own. But I was no longer sure I wanted to play by his rules anymore.

“So, no doughnuts—are you saying Ira was right?” I challenged Paul.

Paul rolled his dark eyes. “It’s not your looks or your sex appeal I’m worried about. It’s your health.”

“I’m perfectly fine,” I assured him.

“You are now. But what about when you get older? A fit body is a successful body. And it houses a happy mind.”

A fit body houses a happy mind.
Could he be right? Would I find happiness on the lower end of the bathroom scale? Would being lighter make me not only feel better, but more satisfied about my life? Technically, yes. I’d look better and feel better. Was it really down to being thin again? Yes—I remembered the looks I got when I was thin and it felt great.

I remembered what it had been like, being slim. It had empowered me. There was no cartwheel I couldn’t (in my younger years—I haven’t tried lately) accomplish, no race I couldn’t win. I would wake up in the mornings thinking,
‘Wow, not only do I not feel like shit anymore; I actually feel good!
’ No headaches, no stomachaches, no backaches that would keep me twisting and turning in bed (“Thrashing like a pig on a spit”), according to Ira. I’d have to literally grip the bars of our wrought-iron bed to be able to turn over, my back was so bad.

“You’re starting to sound like my mother,” I huffed. “How did we get from talking about your latest squeeze to me?”

Paul shrugged. “Because for the last few years you’ve been miserable—and Carl’s boring the crap out of me. I’m thinking of a way to get rid of him. Speaking of which, tell me again how you killed Ira last night,” he giggled, suddenly more flippant, and I grinned despite myself. It was our little secret, a harmless game, really, but a real sanity-saver.

They weren’t dreams, but open-eyed fantasies of getting rid of my husband once and forever in the funniest ways, like maybe shackling and squeezing him, big mouth and all, into a Tupperware box, lid on tight, his face and body assuming the shape of the container, sometimes round, sometimes square—you know, like in cartoons; his big eyes blinking, begging—no,
demanding
—in a muffled voice that I should let him out.

I forgot all about the chocolate doughnut as the pleasant images caressed my mind, and I brightened up and stifled a giggle. “I hung him upside down to dry in the sun for days—like my
Nonna
Silvia’s ham joints,” I answered. “And when his carcass was ready, I made some real groovy leather bags.”

Paul’s eyes flashed. “That’s still too light a treatment for Ira.”

I don’t need to tell you that Ira and Paul weren’t bosom buddies. My husband was not tolerant of anyone different from himself. It was a wonder he married me, an Italian Catholic, when his family had always hoped that one day he would meet a nice thin Jewish girl.

Paul always had something to say, and Ira tolerated him politely enough when he was around, but in the evening he’d sniff the air and sigh, “I can smell your gay friend’s cheap perfume.”

Not even the fact that Paul was a respected freelance costume designer who travelled the world for his living (and whose butt had never seen a desk chair) could sway Ira.

“Sunshine,” Paul said, cupping my clenched jaw with his free hand and bringing me back to reality as we reached my front door without my realizing, “instead of having these visions of murder, why don’t you just leave him already?”

Why, he kept asking. For two excellent reasons. One was twelve years old and the other eight.

“I can’t. He’s my husband.”

“What, you don’t think you could live without him? Please tell me that not even you are that masochistic?” Paul begged.

Ira’s revelation of his lack of desire for me certainly put things into perspective. I was living with a man who didn’t find me attractive. How far were we from the end? Were we really at Stage Four?

* * *

After dinner, Paul sat down with Maddy (did I mention I loved him and would marry him in a heartbeat?) and did their usual thing: drawing clothes for her paper dolls. At eight years old, she was becoming alarmingly similar to my mother, who was a fashion victim and the emptiest head on the planet if you didn’t count Maddy’s paper dolls.

She was so confident, so pretty.
Please, God. Make her as intelligent and grounded as she is pretty, and not an airhead like Marcy or my sister Judy. Make her be a good wife and mother if that is what she wants, and spend time with them. Make her be successful and happy with anything she wants to do.

And, please, let Warren be a patient man, and be kind to his children and wife, even if she won’t be a raging beauty. Let him understand the beauty inside people.

I sat on a kitchen stool with a glass of wine, observing my mini, three-dollar-each succulent cacti plants, perfectly aligned like little soldiers on the kitchen window sill, their thorns sticking out proudly as if to say, “Look at us—we don’t need Erica’s TLC! We can survive without water!” And, boy, could they. I’d forget to water them for weeks, and they’d be there for me, resistant, alive and beautiful, with even little purple or pink flowers sticking out from the top, no matter how much I neglected them. I wished my poor kids knew the same survival techniques, but I guess I was asking too much. Hell, I wish
I
knew them.
Look at me! I can survive without sex with my husband! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Maybe one day I’d have the time to plant a beautiful rosebush right by the front door, so every time I came home I’d be greeted by beauty. Roses, the symbol of love. I sighed. Life wasn’t perfect, and if I had no sex life, there were also other things I still had to master, like, for instance, being a housewife. I was trying with all my heart. In any case, I always had Plan B—envisioning the day my fantasies of killing my husband would become reality. God, sometimes life was a pain in the ass.

Chapter 4:

Mother Marcy?

M
arcy threw her hands up in the air. “Ira told me you’re still refusing surgery. Really, Erica, it’s the least you could do to save your marriage.”

I glared at my mother sitting in her size four YSL number opposite me at lunch at The Farthington Hotel, where I worked. She never came to see me, so I’d figured it must be something important; i.e. her next shopping spree in Europe.

Marcy had never really been a hands-on mother, and in particular with me. Sometimes it seemed she simply tolerated my existence, from my birth all the way up until... well, now. But at the same time she doted upon her only son, Vince, and shared a fashion fever with my sister Judy, with whom she still can be seen today storming the designer shops in the city center.

Marcy doesn’t want to be called Mom by any of us and her seven grandchildren have to call her Marcy as well. She can’t stand the sight of elderly people because she’s terrified of aging and has never said anything nice about the way I looked (although I couldn’t blame her most of the time) and my lifestyle choices.

At least
I
got out of bed every morning and earned myself a living, as opposed to Marcy, who had my dad to keep her in sexy negligees and shiny kimonos until noon at fifty-nine (I’m not kidding you) years of age, and designer numbers size four (Four? Four? How the hell did she give birth to three kids and stay a size four? She didn’t exercise, she smoked
and
drank like a stevedore.) And here I was; a glorious size twenty and dodging the umpteenth diet.

If it hadn’t been for my
Nonna
Silvia and my mom’s three sisters,
Zia
Maria,
Zia
Martina and
Zia
Monica, we’d have certainly died—my siblings Judy and Vince of malnutrition, and me of obesity (I was the only one smart enough to have a stash of junk food under my bed). And here she was talking down to me as usual, under the pretense of exasperated, motherly love.

“What will it take for you to understand that you can’t keep a man, looking like you do?”

I sighed. Yes, we all knew I was big, thank you very much. But I’d tried to lose weight. God knew I’d tried and tried and tried. And failed and failed and failed. I couldn’t seem to stay disciplined. Wasn’t I making enough sacrifices in my life as it was? What was wrong with indulging in a little cream puff at the end of a long hard day during which I’d done the manager
and
the homemaker shifts, saving the hotel from yet another disaster and keeping the kids from climbing the walls?

Okay, so sweets were killing me instead of helping me improve the quality of my life. Maybe if I renounced one every now and then...? No. I had to renounce them entirely. For my health. It was time to admit defeat. Even I could see that. But, hell, was it too much, expecting my husband to still love me in the process?

It wasn’t as if he was George Clooney. He was now almost scrawny, balding and bad-tempered—nothing like the guy I’d fallen in love with. Back then he was good-looking, charming, ambitious and sexy. And so was I. We’d been, I used to think, a perfect fit. But the years had not been kind to us—neither physically nor emotionally.

“Don’t you think it’s time, Erica?” Marcy persisted.

“Time for what?” I replied as I swallowed a generous forkful of shrimp salad. I loved the pink sauce.

She took a sip of her martini and rolled her eyes. “To lose weight, of course. Think of how your love life would improve—think of the sex.”

“Ewh, I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation with you,” I said, raising my evil eyebrow at her. She shrugged her slim, silk-covered shoulders, so glamorous she’d put any Hollywood star to shame.

“I’m just saying. Your whole life would improve if you lost weight. So please at least consider the option of surgery. You’d see the results in a matter of months. And think of the
clothes
.”

I involuntarily squirmed. There it was—clothes. Her dream; my nightmare since childhood. Marcy dragging me to Macy’s was still one of my most traumatizing early-life experiences. Nothing pleased her. When I tried something on, she’d tut and shake her head, asking the salesladies, in a very loud voice, if there was a
larger
size. And when they’d cough and whisper that there wasn’t, she’d check the seams to see if the outfit could be widened (by my Grandmother Silvia or Aunt Martina of course; Marcy couldn’t sew a stitch to save herself and still can’t today).

Then, totally mortified, I’d look at the beloved item and mumble, “You know, I really don’t like it anyway.” At which point she’d open her mouth to say something but think better of it.

Sometimes there would be a party and I’d
have
to get a fancy outfit, usually a dress. My after-school look was baggy jeans and a T-shirt, but I wasn’t blind. I saw the nice accessories and stuff, and my arty soul was already longingly matching this with that item as I walked past the racks, pretending not to care my size was, for a kid my age, unheard of, nor that I would forever be a
Fashion Pariah
.

So glitzy Marcy would sigh. “Go into the changing room, get undressed and I’ll bring you whatever I can find.” Then she’d turn to the sales reps. “Ladies, I’ll need
all
the help I can get from you today.”

Do you know how many times I stood there behind Macy’s dressing-room drapes, practically naked, at Marcy’s mercy, with that offending neon light and those deforming circus mirrors pointing at my butt, waiting for her to find a piece of cloth that could actually span the width of my body?

Now keep in mind that it’s
my
mom we’re talking about and not, say, yours, who very probably was thrilled to see you in a nice dress, looking all pretty and waiting for your prom date. (My boyfriend, Peter DeVita, the only one I’d ever had up until then, moved away just before my prom.)

And every season the same story. I was sick of it. As much as I liked fashionable clothes and stuff, I didn’t want them if they were going to cost me so much pain and humiliation. So in the years that followed, I bought an incredible amount of shoes and bags, all cool and fashionable.

I created my ‘wear it with your baggy jeans’ look. It didn’t catch on at school, though. Could you imagine me in an enormous lilac, off-the-shoulder dress that ‘tapered’ down the hips? No, I didn’t think so either, unless you figured me as one of the dancing hippos in Fantasia.

Why was it so difficult for Marcy to understand that not every woman could dress and look like a model? That for some people it was difficult to even look decent? She’d been born gorgeous. I hadn’t. Why couldn’t she just chill out and concentrate on my good qualities, like my excellent communication and organizational skills, the fact that I was a great cook, a great manager and a very hands-on mom? All qualities she’d never had.

And now, at almost thirty-five, I felt like the unhappy high-school girl again. Was this my life, running around in ever-decreasing, sad cycles? Was there to be no pleasure whatsoever in my life? Never again?

I turned in my seat to call my head waiter. “Mitch, can you have someone bring me the dessert cart, please?”

“Of course, Mrs. Lowenstein.”

Marcy’s mouth fell open. “Dessert? Aren’t you full enough?”

I looked at her, all dolled up and daintily wiping her mouth. No. I would never be full, because the emptiness inside me went down miles deep. Nothing could sate my hunger for love, my need to feel accepted even if I didn’t look like Judy or didn’t, not even at ten years of age, fit into Marcy’s clothes. I know because I tried playing dress-up in her closet once and went back to my room heartbroken. Not even her
shoes
fit me.

As she graciously declined the
cannoli
, the
sacher torte
and even the almond
parfait
, I motioned to Mitch for a slice of my one and only weakness (well, not quite), the
tiramisù.
Spoonful after spoonful I could already feel the joy and satisfaction spreading inside me, dissolving Ira’s unkind words and the life we were leading.

Marcy leaned in. “I’m talking life-changing surgery to you and you eat life-threatening foods?” she hissed. “Erica, what is the matter with you—have you got a
death
wish?”

And then it struck me that if Marcy hadn’t always been so judgmental, making me feel inadequate and blubbery,
I
might have liked myself a little more, for both Ira and myself, just enough to not feel ugly, or worse,
dull.
And then I wouldn’t have felt so empty all the time, and wouldn’t need to comfort eat to compensate the pain inside me. If I’d had my mother’s life and looks, I’d have been
happy
.

And most of all, if I could better my life and move to Tuscany (where I’d chase my laughing children across the golden fields), I wouldn’t have to sit here and listen to this.

But here I was for now—an overweight, under-loved struggling housewife, ever trying to finish tasks and keeping on top of it all. Ever trying to lose weight with three-week diets (I couldn’t manage for longer) that only made me fatter than before I’d started.

As I sat there and silently ate my
tiramisù
under Marcy’s resigned eyes, I realized that if it hadn’t been for Warren’s birth, Ira wouldn’t have proposed to me in that snowy, slippery backyard thirteen years ago.

And now with one unkind word from him, I’d been catapulted back to my teen-age years—once again conscious of my heavy butt and dark, heavy clothes. Okay. I was obese. Got it. Now what was I going to do with that information? What was I going to do with all the emotions bubbling and festering, like a suppurating, infected wound, inside me—the fear of not succeeding in a diet, the anxiety, the humiliation of remaining me when everyone else expected me to look like a model?

And now, after two kids (it is nice to blame them, isn’t it?), years of not being able to get to the gym, and eating up everything from the kids’ plates as well as mine, here I was, a product of my own unhappy choices. You can’t imagine what a big part frustration played. You drink a glass of water and you instantly start bloating, bloating, bloating until you start to leaven like bread, and one horrible morning you look down and can’t see your feet anymore. And when you search your once pretty face in the mirror you see two, or at least one the
size
of two.

I desperately looked into myself as I swallowed my dessert and my tears so Marcy wouldn’t see, and delved for the
me
I once met briefly fifty kilos ago, the one who’d lured Josh Irons onto a moonlit
English beach and driven all those Brit boys mad. The one who, albeit only for a few years—the best of my whole life—fit into the coolest clothes. The one with the awesome butt. And the confidence of a lioness.

Now I was a big fat clawless cat, meekly wandering through the jungle, trying to get to the other side unscathed, all the while graceful antelope, sleek wolves, jackals and hyenas passed me and turned in scorn. I was an unwanted stray in the jungle of my own life.

And
Ira wasn’t having sex with me until I fit onto his lap without the two of us bowling over. How could the world want you if your own husband didn’t accept you? How could your man love you if
you
recoiled in horror at the sight of yourself?

Plus, lately I was hungrier than ever because Ira would watch me like a hawk at dinner, scowling if I ever went for a second piece of bread or put too much on my plate. But he heaped his up to the ceiling, because he was skinny. The truth was he had skinny arms, legs and bony (how come I’d never noticed that before?) shoulders, and was actually much shorter than I thought.

And so, because I had this immense emptiness to fill, when the coast was clear I would sneak a snack between doing the dishes and the laundry, gobbling it down in one quick gulp, lest he figured me out. Which of course he almost always did. His radar would bleep and he’d sneak up behind me and tap me on my shoulder, growling his usual, ‘
Christ
, you’re not eating again, are you?’ Ever tried swallowing when someone’s just scared the crap out of you?

For a family of no specific religion, Christ had made many an appearance in our house, and in every room, too. In the bathroom: “Jesus Christ, Erica, why don’t you step onto that scale and face reality?” In the living room: ”Jesus Christ, Erica, why don’t you move over? You’re taking up the whole sofa!” And finally in the bedroom: ”Jesus Christ, you’re snoring again!”

At the beginning of my diets I was always a loose twenty, meaning my jeans would fit comfortably. After a stint of dieting, I’d lose some, even to the point that I needed a belt, and then, boom—I shot right back up and
over
size twenty, which meant my clothes became so tight they cut into my waist and stretched across my boobs, buttons threatening to pop, leaving unsightly gaps. “Are you wearing a nude-colored bra again?” Marcy would say. ”Why are you trying your best to look like Mrs. Doubtfire?”

My weight kept me in constant despair.

“What about the sheer pleasure of being beautiful? It’s important to a woman but you don’t understand because—” Marcy closed her mouth and took another swig of her martini.

I looked at her expectantly. “What? Because I’ve never been beautiful?”

And down she went with the
I never said thats
and
Why do you have to put words in my mouths?

All my life I’d had to listen to Marcy praising Judy’s mermaid figure and how all the boys went gaga over her and how proud she was about her. Never mind that Judy went through guys like an Eskimo through snow and that she would’ve been a high school dropout if I hadn’t helped her through that year she came home pregnant. Never mind that prior to that, Judy had been coming and going every evening, and that for her
every
night was date night. I couldn’t even get a friend to come over on a Friday night because they were all busy out with boys as if the end of the world was near and they didn’t want to die virgins.