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Authors: Alison Pace

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BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
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“Right,” Stephanie continues, “think of a post-Brad Jen in Chicago. All those pictures of her running, all those clips about her staying at the Peninsula Hotel on Michigan Avenue,” and as she says that, an article she read about Jennifer Aniston pops into her mind, and a lightbulb goes on above it. “She wouldn’t have taken him back. Not ever. Or at least we need to believe that. She would have held her head high and she would have eaten grilled lamb and vegetables and goat cheese!” she says excitedly. “I read that exact menu in
People
magazine!”
“You know, I think I read that, too. I thought I read it somewhere else, but maybe it was in
People
?” Meredith answers, and Stephanie’s pretty sure she sounds a bit enthusiastic, even if she is taking the opportunity to subtly announce her preference for magazines other than
People
.
Stephanie pauses and pictures Jennifer Aniston, in the early days right after Brangelina was unleashed onto the world, and she’s sure Meredith must be picturing it, too. “You know,” she adds on temptingly, “Jennifer would have balanced out her good fats and good carbs and lean proteins.”
And they pause, and they don’t say anything, and then Meredith says softly, “She would have gone on the Zone.”
“I think so,” Stephanie agrees, smiling.
“Steph?” Meredith says, “I want to go on the Zone with you. And it’s not just because of Josh. Well, maybe it’s a little because of Josh, but it’s also my reflection, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I don’t know if this makes sense, but I don’t see myself when I look at my reflection, and I think when you look at your reflection you should be able to see yourself.”
“I hear that,” Stephanie says, and she does. She listens as Meredith takes a breath.
“And, Stephanie? Also, it’s because of you. I want to do it with you. I want us to do something together again.”
“Oh, Meres, that’s so great!” she exclaims, instantly excited at the prospect, at the camaraderie, at something that they can share together and talk about other than Josh coming back, or restaurants that she can’t go to anymore, or Aubrey, who they can’t really talk about. And just like an eight-year-old Meredith destined for certain fame, Stephanie can’t wait to do this together. “We’ll succeed at this,” she adds on. “I just know we will if we do it together.”
“Go team!” Meredith says, and Stephanie thinks that’s a good sign that she says that, even though she was never the sporty one. Stephanie was always the sporty one, even her initials were sporty: SI, for Stephanie Isley, the same as
Sports Illustrated.
“Go team!” Stephanie says back to her, and thinks how her last name isn’t Isley anymore anyway, how it’s Cunningham now. “Okay, how much do you want to lose?” she asks next, her tone unmistakably upbeat.
“Um, I’d say around what you said you wanted to lose. Maybe a little bit more?” Meredith answers.
“You can totally do it, Meres,” Stephanie tells her, and hopes that she isn’t already thinking of the next time she’s going out to dinner. She grabs the book,
The Zone Diet
by Dr. Barry Sears, PhD, which has been sitting right next to her laptop, and opens it up. “Okay, listen,” she says, and begins to read out loud. “According to Dr. Barry Sears, the Zone is ‘that mysterious but very real state in which your body and mind work together at their ultimate best.’ ”
“That mysterious but very real state,” Meredith repeats, almost dutifully.
“Sounds possible, right?”
“Yes, it does,” Meredith says, pausing before she adds, “along with not possible.” Stephanie pretends not to hear that last part.
“Yes, and look,” she says, holding out the book, and pointing to the very next line, even though Meredith isn’t right there to read along with her. “It says the premise is simple. Calorie counting doesn’t work. Maintaining the correct ratio of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates is what works. Simple.” Stephanie concludes and then for a few minutes, Meredith doesn’t say anything, and there is only silence on the phone. But she’d have to say that the silence, maybe, it’s hopeful. Ivy pipes up again through her monitor, no longer on the verge of waking up, but now very much awake, and it’s time to go.
As they hang up the phone, as Stephanie heads out of their office to go get Ivy, she really does feel hopeful. At the doorway, she turns around and glances at the Zone book, where she’s left it on Aubrey’s side of the desk, a red, yellow, and white striped beacon of hope.
six
a rose by any other name
“Aubrey?”
Silence. She says his name again, “Aubrey.”
She used to like the sound of his name so much. They used to play back the messages he left on their answering machine. She and Meredith did, when Meredith first got back from Paris, and they lived together, in a railroad apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, right by the river, when she’d just met Aubrey. “Hi, uh, Stephanie? It’s Aubrey calling,” he’d say, and they’d hit
Stop
, and
Rewind
, and
Play
, and he’d say it again. And they’d laugh as if they were a lot younger than they were, and Stephanie would swear she got butterflies in her stomach just from the sound of his voice.
“Hi, uh, it’s Aubrey,” they’d repeat. And when they read the cards that always came with the roses he always sent to Stephanie, Meredith would say, “They’re from Aubrey,” and they’d both smile, widely, completely, and say, “
Aubrey, Aubrey, Aubrey.
He of the excellent name.”
Meredith had once confided that she felt it was both unfortunate, and perhaps indicative of something worse, that she’d only ever been with men who had boring names. Rob, Matt, Dave, Jim. Josh. Stephanie, on the other hand, in addition to her greater capacity for love, had what Meredith believed to be a far greater capacity for attracting men with much more interesting names. Men with Celtic names, last names as first names, names that sounded like somewhere foreign or ancestral, like Aubrey. Aubrey Cunningham. A name you might comment on as cool if you were the type of person to put some stake in names. Before Aubrey, there had been Hillary. So British, so remarkable, even if the man had been neither. There was a Parker once, too. Sporty. And Tiernan, Mackenzie, Addison, Carson, Tucker, Rand, Logan. Preppy, boarding school names, with a little bit of an edge. Crispin, Tyler, Presley. Men who might have a trust fund, or a shotgun. Reid, Asher, Pierce.
“Aubrey?!” she yells, louder this time.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Stephanie! What?” He yells, quite loudly, from down in his workroom. In an instant, Ivy is awake and begins to scream herself. As Stephanie slams out of the kitchen chair she’d been sitting in (she painted all the kitchen chairs white herself, and has thoughts of replacing the caning by hand), and heads to the stairs and up them, she thinks that surely it was Aubrey’s yelling, and not hers, that has woken Ivy; Aubrey’s yelling that must be, to Ivy’s sensitive and receptive young ears, so indicative of the marital state to which she has been born into, Aubrey’s fault that Ivy is now awake, again, at eight, after she’s already been asleep. As she thinks of how high the possibility is that Ivy will now be up for the rest of the night, it is only the fact that she is sure he wouldn’t comfort her, is sure he wouldn’t even notice, that keeps her from crying. She decides instead as she storms upstairs that she’s not even going to talk to him right now, not even going to tell him why she was calling him. Maybe that’ll show him.
She goes to Ivy and picks her up. She holds her, and rubs her back, and says in the most soothing voice she can manage, “Daddy didn’t mean to yell.” Though there’s something about talking about Aubrey to Ivy that feels, if not exactly wrong, then headed in that direction. She can almost glimpse a version of her future, a future in which she might be old and sour and bitter and wear a housecoat. And in this future she never did lose the weight, so, really, the constant wearing of the housecoat is most practical. She’ll refer to Aubrey when she speaks about him to Ivy not as Aubrey, or even as Daddy, but only as “your father.”
Your father is going to have to be more considerate about rearranging his visitation days
. She can see it, somewhere on the horizon, less the part about the housecoat than the part about Aubrey’s name not being Aubrey, but still, it’s there.
“Mommy didn’t mean to yell,” she adds, maybe just to be fair. Mommy, she thinks, was just trying to ask Daddy if he would like to have some of the somewhat lackluster but Zone-friendly broiled lemon salmon, with one broiled tomato cut in half and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese (one cup of steamed green beans, one large spinach salad and a half cup of red grapes as dessert.) When she and Meredith had embarked on the Zone, a full four days ago, she’d thought it best, recipe-wise, to start with something from the section of the book called “Less Than Gourmet Cooking in The Zone.” She came to this decision after the Mexican Holiday Salad from the “Gourmet Cooking in the Zone” section that she had so painstakingly prepared on the first day had turned out not to be such a holiday, in fact not very festive at all. This happens, she’s realizing; things turn out quite differently from how you’d assumed they’d be.
“Da Da!” Ivy says, no longer crying, quite recovered now and also looking very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. A move back in the direction of the crib sets off instant distress, so instead of taking the scenario any further, Stephanie asks, rhetorically, “Do you want to try coming downstairs for a while, and you can have dinner with Mommy?” and thinks as she does that there can’t be any reason why a person can’t mash up grapes.
As they head down the stairs, Ivy’s entire being, all the energy around her, brightens as she says, “Da Da,” again. Stephanie doesn’t say,
Yes, Da Da,
nor does she say,
Ma Ma,
as she has on recent occasions taken to saying. She doesn’t say anything. She wonders, as Ivy repeats “Da Da Da Da Da” again, right as they walk by the door to his workroom, if Aubrey can hear her. She imagines he can, and then she has to remind herself that she had already decided that she wasn’t going to cry.
Balancing Ivy on her hip, she reaches into the refrigerator and takes out her six-ounce piece of salmon, her tomato, and leaves Aubrey’s in there. She steamed the green beans earlier, so those just need to be reheated in the microwave. She wonders if it will mess up the ratios if she simply eats all the green beans, hers and Aubrey’s, and just saves the spinach. But when is she saving it for? And for whom? For Popeye, perhaps? And if so, she wonders, when will he be here?
She checks something in her new book,
Zone Perfect Meals in Minutes
, fastens Ivy into her high chair, and puts her salmon and tomato under the broiler. She focuses in on the cover of the cookbook, and thinks of how much Meredith loves to cook, always has. No matter how much cooking went on in their childhood, no matter how much Mom loved to be in the kitchen, always cooking, Stephanie never really took to it. She reads the smaller print caption on the spine of the book:
150 Fast & Simple Healthy Recipes!
The exclamation point is not actually on the book, she has added it herself. She’s always thought it to be of the utmost importance to embark on things, no matter how hard they might be, with a good and positive attitude. And what better way to exemplify a good, positive attitude than with an exclamation point, really? But even with the exclamation point, she thinks also that maybe the Zone Delivery, the service Caryn used, might be a better idea than she had initially deemed it to be. Surely, having all these Zone Perfect (or Zone Friendly or whatever it is they are) meals arrive in coolers and microwave containers each morning would be so much easier. But the Zone Delivery, something about it, it makes her feel a little bit like a failure.
She’s home all the time (and all the time in this case is not merely a figure of speech). She should have no problem at all making dinner, even if dinner, now that she is endeavoring to be in the Zone, involves a bit more calculation, is a bit more of a scientific dance than it used to be. It’s not as if in addition to Ivy she has a full-time, incredibly demanding job. People like that could have the Zone Delivery without feeling like a failure; people like the investment banker character in that terrifying book,
I Don’t Know How She Does It
, the one that is so beloved by the New Mommy Group, even though as far as Stephanie can tell, no one in the New Mommy Group seems to be dashing off to an investment bank, or to any other job for that matter. Stephanie does not know what the New Mommies are thinking of when they hold the book up and exclaim, “This is so me!” When Stephanie thinks of the book, she thinks that the author, Allison Pearson, is married to Anthony Lane, the man who writes the film reviews for the
New Yorker.
Mostly when Stephanie thinks of the book, she thinks of how she’d like to be the wife of Anthony Lane. And lately, that’s less because she’s always liked his movie reviews, and more because a life lived with Anthony Lane wouldn’t be a life lived with Aubrey.
And anyway, she thinks, charging $39.99 a day, which is $1,239.69 a month (yes, she’s done the math) would be something she’d need to discuss with Aubrey, in the spirit of communication and honesty that she would like to do her part to perpetuate within their marriage, even though there is the part of her that says, “Face it, sister, it’s gone.” And even if she were to go the way of saying, screw it, when it came to perpetuating a spirit of honesty and communication within the marriage, as some people in her marriage have done, Aubrey would notice the charge on their credit card statement. Or, actually, these days, would he? Does Aubrey even pay the credit card bills anymore? Or has he lost complete interest in that, too? Fuck. She should check on that.
Once her less-than-intriguing salmon and her tomato are just about broiled, Ivy starts to fuss. It’s because she’s over-tired, but she won’t sleep, possibly because it’s dark out. Since she’s in the high chair already, Stephanie thinks it’s not going to hurt anyone if she gives Ivy just a little mashed banana. Mashed banana, as soothing as it is to Ivy, has in turn become to Stephanie so similar to sleep. She thinks it would be really great it they both slept. She begins to peel a banana and thinks of her own mother, and how their pediatrician told her that fat babies would become fat adults, and how she and Meredith were always on baby diets, and then, look at what that accomplished. She mashes the banana and tries not to worry. She has possibly begun to worry too much, she can see this. She reminds herself, with her back facing the general vicinity of the workroom door, that there are, of course, plenty of things to be happy about.
BOOK: Through Thick and Thin
2.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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