Through Thick and Thin (11 page)

She’s thinking of this one scene from
She’s Having a Baby.
It’s this part where Kevin Bacon, who’s at the time terribly tired of the couple’s baby-having efforts, the charts and the fertility times and the scheduled sex, meets another woman. He meets this woman by the fountain at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago and when he looks at her, he looks at her like he’s going to forget for a while all about Elizabeth McGovern. And then right after that, the very next scene, Kevin Bacon is on the train, heading back to the suburbs and he looks really tired. For the longest time, Stephanie always thought he’d just looked at the woman (who, by the way, happened to be French) standing in front of the fountain and had then turned right around and gotten on his train and gone home to Elizabeth McGovern. It was the longest time she thought that, until someone pointed out to her that, no, he had in fact had an affair. Even though it was all off camera, it still happened. Just because you didn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And for a long time, Stephanie had wished she didn’t know that.

“Okay,” Stephanie says out loud to herself, once Ivy has rested her just-burped self, her precious blonde head, down on her shoulder. She tries to make a mental note again not to talk out loud to herself. She thinks there might be something alarming to the trend that has been, for a while now, developing. And so she thinks to herself, rather than saying out loud,
I am not going to go on UrbanBaby today.
She is sure there is darkness there, in the nameless, faceless lines of pink and green text. And she’s sure spending all that time lurking in a chat room, even one about babies, staring so long at a computer, it’s so Aubrey-like in its isolation, if you think about it. And at this point, Stephanie would really rather not.

There’s the Junior League of Ridgewood, she’s considering looking into that. There’s the New Mommy Group that she’s already part of and just needs to make an effort to like more. She missed the last meeting, she really shouldn’t have; if she’s learned anything from all her years of team sports it’s that you show up. No matter what. You show up and you play. By the rules. She’s always thought so, and believing in that has always worked out well.

She puts Ivy down in her crib, and Ivy stays down and Stephanie takes a moment to be happy for that. She wants to have a moment in which she’s aware she’s happy; lately she thinks they’re harder to come by. And also, she wants the Baby Sleeping Gods, whoever they are and she’s sure they must exist, to know she really appreciates it, to know she really,
really
does, whenever it is that they make it so that Ivy sleeps. Even if it is mostly during the day.

As she makes her way downstairs, instead of going into their office, where there is darkness in the sunlight that glints so cheerfully across the side of Aubrey’s desk, she heads through the family room and into the kitchen.

She has a new system. She has been putting perfectly sliced squares of part-skim mozzarella cheese into Ziploc baggies. She’s pretty sure the answer is to have everything planned out and baggied up in advance. She pulls a baggie from the red cardboard box, reaching simultaneously into the cabinet where she keeps the Goldfish pretzels. Baggies, baggies everywhere replete with premeasured blocks of proteins and fats and carbs. Brilliant, flawless. Except of course for the part-skim mozzarella cheese. That’s actually a bit complicated because part-skim mozzarella cheese is in fact both a fat block
and
a protein block. And if you think about things like that too much, it can be quite discouraging, discouraging enough so that you’ll need to devote a fair amount of time (time you might not feel you have) to reading the testimonials peppered throughout the book, all the many success stories—Kathy L., Lori P., Don R. to name but a few—in order to get back on track.

She counts out pretzels and puts them into piles of fourteen. She thinks she’ll sign up for one of those breast cancer walks, or AIDS walks, or MS. The ones where you walk all day, every day, for three days and sleep in tents at night. She’ll bring Ivy with her. As she slides the pretzels into their baggies she thinks how in
The Zone
by Barry Sears, PhD, there is no mention of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish pretzels. She wonders if they are possibly a trick learned later in
Mastering the Zone
, or if maybe, unbeknownst to her, Caryn just made it up. She wonders.

She thinks of Kevin Bacon on the train ride back to the suburbs and the way he looked, so exhausted, so tired, so defeated, so different from the way he looked when he looked at the French woman. When he looked at her, he looked so alive. Aubrey doesn’t very often look alive anymore.

When the phone rings a moment later, it’s all she can do not to say,
Thank you,
out loud, as she picks it up.

“Hello.”

“Look at you answering the phone on the first ring,” Meredith says in a pleasant and jovial tone of voice, especially so for Meredith. And yet it annoys her, which is so unlike Stephanie and especially so unlike her toward Meredith, even though Meres has the propensity to be—especially lately and more and more frequently—somewhere in the general vicinity of annoying.

“Hi, Meres.”

“Okay. So, Steph, I’m just saying, the Zone sucks.”

Stephanie takes a deep, measured breath and lets it out. She does this, she’s pretty sure, as much for Meredith to hear her as for its purported relaxing qualities. “I don’t think the Zone sucks.”

“Okay, how much weight have you lost?”

“Meres, the same as yesterday. I’m only weighing myself once a week. You know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself more than once a week,” Stephanie says, though actually as she says that she wonders,
Does Meredith know that?
Is that information garnered actually from the book or did she get that from Caryn, too? Or maybe did she just make it up herself? For the life of her right now, she has no idea.

“Okay, so four pounds?” Meredith says. And the way she says it, Stephanie can’t help but notice that she sort of spits out “four pounds,” like it’s nothing.
Four pounds
, she says, like it’s not a big deal at all, like it isn’t a little bit of a triumph. But it is.

“Yes, four pounds,” Stephanie says. She says the number with pride and tries not to think of what a small number it is when viewed in the context of how much more she has to lose. It’s still a triumph, or even a victory. She believes that.

“Okay, well, good,” Meredith says, pausing (could it be reflectively? Or is it far more likely just a pause?) and then she continues, “I’m happy for you, it’s just, I’ve lost none.” Stephanie doesn’t say anything, she waits to see if Meredith is going to offer up any self-analytical insight, if she has some story to tell or if, rather, “The Zone sucks,” is her only story.

Meredith doesn’t say anything.

“I mean, Mere, are you actually doing it?” she asks, as gently as she thinks she can. “Are you counting everything up and adding it properly? Are you measuring things? I have this system, maybe it’ll help you, see I use baggies—”

“No, see that’s just it,” Meredith cuts her off, before even waiting to see what the baggies could be for. “I can’t bring baggies out to dinner with me,” she continues, sounding, Stephanie thinks, just a bit closer to incensed with each word. “But I could avoid things. Maybe if we did Atkins? Then I could just avoid all carbs? The Zone isn’t just avoiding all carbs, it’s so much more complicated than that.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t look at it as more complicated, but rather as more flexible?” Stephanie offers, trying not to think about other things, trying really just to think about helping Meredith, about getting Meredith to stick with this, with her, because that will help. It will help both of them. “Really, Meres, when you think about it, The Zone truly is more flexible because it does in fact allow carbs. Just not bad ones and you just have to have them in the right proportion to your fats and your proteins.” And as Stephanie says this, she feels like she gets it, like she understands, like she’s in control. And that’s one more thing than the previous zero things of which she’d felt in control.

“It’s too much math,” Meredith says back quickly. “You know I hate math. And it’s
the Zone
,” she continues in a singsong voice, but not such a nice singsong voice. “And then, once you’ve figured that out, it’s not as if that’s enough, it’s all, okay now let’s move on up to the next level, let’s try
Mastering the Zone
, let’s buy another book, in addition to the recipe book that I never get to use because I never get to eat at home.”

“I thought you were eating at home?”

“Stephanie,” Meredith continues, a quick and halting emphasis on each syllable,
Steph-a-nie
, “you know how hard it is for me. It’s not like I can just sit down each night at home to my Zone-prepared dinner. It is really hard for me to justify eating at home. Do you know how much work I have to do? Do you how much harder I make it on myself if I stay home?”

“I’m not saying you don’t have work to do,” Stephanie replies. “I’m just saying it because you were the one who said you weren’t going to go out as much.”

“I said lunch. I was talking about lunch.”

“Okay, right.”

“But I don’t even know if I should do that, I mean lunch is important, it’s as important in some places as dinner,” she explains, and then as an important addendum, adds on quickly, “it’s just dinner without the cocktails.”

Stephanie thinks this might be an opportunity for positive reinforcement. Surely they’re everywhere if you just know where to look, and maybe that’s what it is lately, maybe lately she’s simply forgotten where to look. “Well that’s good then. Because I think I read somewhere that drinking can play a big part in making weight loss difficult.”

“What’s that?” Meredith asks, and Stephanie feels a small, tiny internal triumph, Meredith is actually listening rather than talking. It’s a rarity, and like the loss of four pounds, a victory.

“Drinking. All the drinking can make losing weight harder.”

“Really, Stephanie?” Meredith says a bit caustically, “I could have sworn it was the eating.” Stephanie doesn’t say anything.

Stephanie would count to ten, she would count to ten out loud if she felt that would help, but she doesn’t really feel it will. She takes a deep breath and counters, “Well, I think that you can’t look at it as a race to the finish. You have to look at it as a lifestyle change, a permanent change you’re going to make in your life, and I think that’s really the case with any diet we would do.”

Meredith exhales; it’s an exhale that says,
Whatever, Stephanie.
Stephanie knows this as she looks at her baggies so lovingly prepared for the next two days. She knows this as she glances through the archway to the family room and the door beyond it and she feels for a moment such a rush of despair that she can’t think of anything to do except stay on the diet. “And also,” she says slowly, measuredly, “I don’t think you have to get the
Mastering the Zone
book, I think that’s just if you want it, just if, you know, you want to take it up a level.”

“It’s like freaking Dungeons and Dragons with all the levels!” Meredith says next. “Between the Dungeons and Dragons and the math, all you’d have to do is throw in a field hockey match and it could be a Greatest Hits of everything that sucked about high school.”

“Speaking of field hockey,” Stephanie says, “it does say that exercise is a big part of this program. Of every program.” And maybe she says that just a little bit to be mean.

“I just think that if we’re going to do this together—”

“Not
if
we are. We are. We’re doing it together,” Stephanie reminds her.

“Yes, yes, I know, and I swear, really I’m not trying to be a pain.”

“No, of course not,” Stephanie says and she’s joking, and she’s not.

“No, Steph, really. I’m not trying to be awful, it’s just maybe, couldn’t we try to find something that might work for both of us? It’s not like you’ve wasted time on the Zone, it’s not like it’s all for nothing. You’ll just start the next diet four pounds ahead of the game, right?”

“What were you thinking of?” Stephanie asks, taking slow, measured breaths.
Look for the positive,
she tells herself.
Surely, it’s everywhere.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I have felt bad about not embracing it, our diet, because I think it’s important to embrace it, the way you embrace things, and so I did some research. I read up on all these different diets. I think I’m very informed now, and I think I found some that might be easier for me to embrace. And things, generally, are easier for you to embrace, right? I don’t think it’s as hard for you, you’re not as hindered as I am by the need to go out to dinner.”

“No,” she says, “I’m definitely not hindered by that.” Stephanie thinks of the words
easier for you
, how Meredith says them as if there is so much truth in them. And she can’t really wrap her head around how she could ever go about explaining to Meredith that
easy
is no longer in her vocabulary, that the fact that someone isn’t required by her important employer, for her prestigious and coveted job, to eat out night after night in the best restaurants, doesn’t mean life is
easy
. She tries to be sure that the creeping irritation, the one that spends so much time lately creeping, doesn’t appear in her voice. She tries to make sure the thought,
Oh my God, Meredith, lately sometimes I just wish you could talk in sentences and not in paragraphs
doesn’t find its way into the conversation either, and asks again, “Okay, Meres, which diet were you thinking of?”

“Maybe Atkins? I was thinking maybe we’d do Atkins and I can review steak houses. There are so many steak houses in New York, old standbys and some great new ones, too. Can you believe I haven’t even been to Craftsteak?”

“Craftsteak?”

“You know, it’s on Tenth Avenue.”

“No, I don’t.”