Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (23 page)

But at this particular juncture, Greg wasn’t proposing that we shop for shoes.

“Don’t you think you should get some new pants?” he said, his voice as gentle as he could sculpt it.

I did need new pants. I was down to a pair of jeans and a pair of Army green chinos that fit, and they fit only because I’d worn them so frequently and stretched them so much. They were so faded and frayed that the numbers indicating their sizes weren’t readily discernible. In any case, I wasn’t trying to discern them. Wasn’t that one of the benefits of being in a relationship with someone as devoted as Greg—that I didn’t have to look? My memory was that the chinos were 35s. So I guessed I needed 36s, and I guessed I could live with that, but only until I lost a few pounds.

“OK,” I told Greg. “But just a pair or two, because whatever we buy now isn’t going to fit me a month from now. It’s just to tide me over.”

He didn’t argue.

“And we should go to a discount place,” I added. “T.J. Maxx or Marshalls. It’s not worth spending money on something so temporary.”

He nodded.

We went to T.J. Maxx. The narrow aisles and jammed racks depressed me, but then this shopping excursion wasn’t meant to be fun, just functional. I found the men’s section, then the slacks, then oriented myself in terms of those round white number signs on the horizontal poles, the signs with waist sizes. I dawdled briefly at the 32s, just in case anyone was watching—just for show.

Then it was on to the 34s, though there was no sense looking through those, either. I went grudgingly to the 36s, which would probably fit. Or would they? I realized I was unsure, and wondered for a few instants if in fact the pants that had become too small were 36s. No, no. Impossible. I’d remember if I’d purchased 36s. I’d definitely remember.

From the limited selection of 36s, I plucked a dark green and a dark blue pair. Dark colors were more crucial than ever now. I walked to the dressing room, tried on the green pants. They barely cleared my hips. There wasn’t any point in seeing if I could get the zipper all the way up or button the pants closed. I wouldn’t be able to walk in them.

I tried on the blue pants. They cleared my hips and . . .
oof! sheesh! ouch!
I stood ramrod straight, a guard at Buckingham Palace, as I tugged at the zipper so hard that its metal edges dug like spades into my fingers. I sucked in my stomach. I sucked harder. I held my breath. I could wear these pants, but only if I was willing to part ways with oxygen.

“These are cut really, really slim,” I told Greg when I rejoined him outside the dressing room. “It’s crazy how slim they’re cut.”

“Maybe,” he said, “you should look in the 38s.” He said it like he was expecting this all along.

“They’ll be too baggy,” I argued, suddenly unconvinced they would be.

“It’s no big deal,” he said. “Just try them.”

“Fine,” I said, and grabbed the first two pairs I came across, even though one was a too-light golden color. The other, more acceptable one was dark brown.

Both fit perfectly.

I strode right past Greg on my way out of the dressing room and toward the cashier, the pants not draped over one of my forearms but scrunched up in my clenched hands. As far as I was concerned Greg could catch up with me at the register, beside the car—wherever.

“What’s your problem?” he asked as we left the store.

I was ready to unload on him. How had he let me gain this much weight—however much weight it was—without diplomatically directing my attention to it? How had he not gingerly noted that I wasn’t running as frequently as before and nudged me out the door? Shouldn’t he have stepped in?

But just before I began a tirade, I realized that what I was mistaking for fury at him was really epic embarrassment—outsize shame. I had not only plumped up rounder than I usually let myself get but had done so in front of a witness as near and ever present as I’d ever had, a witness of a more intimate kind. Although I had wanted a margin of error around Greg, this was way more than a margin.

“Midas better be ready,” I told him. “Starting tomorrow, he is going to be taking some long runs with me.” And so he did—with pauses, of course, so other runners could duly admire him. The 38s got looser, and then I retired them, actually threw them away. But they suggested how far I could slide. As it happened, they soft-pedaled the possibilities.

 

 

 

 

Greg and I scouted furniture stores for the right couch to put in the living room and carpet stores for the right rug to put in front of it. Together we took Midas to the vet. We went to his Aunt Margaret’s house for her lasagna and then bickered amiably about it, him defending the way she added cinnamon to her tomato sauce, me crying foul. We signed both of our names on the cards accompanying gifts to the friends we now had in common. As a couple we went to dinner parties, and as a couple we hosted dinner parties. When Mom called, he and she would chat for a good ten minutes before she thought to ask for me or he thought to pass the phone along.

And for my thirtieth birthday, he secretly organized it so that Mom and Dad, Mark and Lisa, Harry and Sylvia, and Adelle and Tom all flew in for a surprise party. He organized it so that even Elli, my grad school coconspirator, who was then living in the Catskills in upstate New York, flew in. About two dozen of my closest friends in Detroit rounded out the crowd.

Many were from the
Free Press
, where I’d come to know just about everyone, because I’d changed assignments so often and because some of the stories I’d done had attracted a lot of attention. Following my stint in the Persian Gulf, my editors had given me an unusually long leash, letting me do ambitious, detailed feature pieces, one of which, a profile of a convicted child molester, had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. It had even led to a book, written with Elli, about child sex abuse by Catholic priests.

After that, I swerved again, indulging an interest in films—I’d seen plenty of Coppola and Malick in addition to
Flashdance
—to become a movie critic for the newspaper. I went to as many as a half dozen movie screenings a week. I flew regularly to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York to interview directors and stars, and I toted home great cocktail party stories: about Sandra Bullock insisting that I stay in her trailer on the set of
While You Were Sleeping
and listen to the brand-new song “You Gotta Be,” by Des’ree, while she changed in the back for her next scene; about Mel Gibson summarily shutting off my tape recorder and launching into a foul-mouthed rant when I asked him about past characterizations of him as a homophobe and archconservative.

Even so, I was restless, wanting new challenges and adventures, feeling too young to stand still, thinking and often talking about leaving Detroit. Whenever I mentioned that, Greg and I fought. He was the only child of two aging parents who lived in the Detroit area. His other relatives, best friends, favorite haunts and most cherished memories: all revolved around Detroit. He wanted to stay there. And he demanded to know why, if I loved him, I couldn’t at least entertain that possibility.

It was a fair question, prompting me to ask myself others. Was the steady contentment I felt with and around him love, or was it comfort? Where was the dividing line between the two, and how could you ever trace it? Was Greg a solution to my physical insecurities, or just a way to hide from the problem?

I hadn’t found any answers when I got a call from a good friend of Elli’s working as a deputy metropolitan editor for the
New York Times
. I’d apparently been on the newspaper’s radar ever since the Pulitzers, and Elli’s friend wanted to know if I was wedded to movie criticism or if I’d consider a general reporting position on the
Times
’s metropolitan desk. I said I’d consider it, and then I was on a plane to New York, and then I had a job offer, and then I was telling Greg he should move with me to New York, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted him to.

For a while he toyed with the idea, but he couldn’t get past his anger that I’d decided to take the job without making sure it was okay with him. He railed about how inconsiderate I was. How selfish. By the time I packed up my footwear and the rest of my expanded wardrobe, it seemed unlikely he’d be following me. I reached New York feeling guilty, crummy and empty.

Ipso Fatso

For Harry’s wedding, Mom and Dad had been relatively restrained. They had hosted only 55 of the wedding’s 130 guests at the previous night’s rehearsal dinner. And they had held the dinner at a restaurant more charming than showy, a sweet country inn of sorts.

For Mark’s wedding to Lisa, which took place in Dallas, her hometown, in the late spring of 1994, Mom and Dad had gone bigger, brasher, Bruni-er. The rehearsal dinner was held in a private club near the top floor of one of the tallest skyscrapers downtown. There were ninety-six guests, because Dad felt that all of Lisa’s closest Texas relatives should be there and of course Uncle Jim and Uncle Mario and their families should be there and, come to think of it, shouldn’t anyone who was traveling from the Northeast all the way to Texas be able to look forward to a fancy meal in addition to the one at the wedding? An additional fancy meal is what Dad gave them, and he insisted that there be a continuously open bar not only in the room where the cocktail hour took place but also in the nearby dining room, where the more serious eating occurred, because he didn’t want people to have to walk all the way across the hall to freshen their drinks. What kind of host, he asked, would allow that?

But Adelle’s wedding to Tom, in Scarsdale in the fall of 1995, let Mom and Dad seize control of the actual wedding reception itself for the first time. They didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

Their worry that people be adequately fed was reflected less in the sit-down meal—a four-course affair, because there had to be a pasta course between the appetizer and the main course—than in the cocktail hour that preceded it. For starters they decided that this hour should be extended to ninety minutes—it
had
to be ninety minutes—because anything shorter wouldn’t allow the 175 guests to size up and visit the food stations that would exist in addition to the passed hors d’oeuvres, of which there were nearly a dozen.

Harry
(far right),
Mark
(next to him)
and me with Adelle at her wedding.

There was a station where a carver stood poised to press his knife through various kinds of meats. There was a pasta station offering different noodles and different sauces. There was, naturally, a cold seafood station, and there was a cheese station as well. And then there was something more eye-catching than anything else, with its glittering glassware and its blocks of ice: a vodka station, with several brands of vodka and several flavors of vodka and pony glasses and Champagne flutes and a half dozen fresh fruits to be used as garnishes, mixes or little nibbles on the side.

“Jim, did you get to the vodka bar?” Dad asked Uncle Jim, leading him in that direction. Dad was the first of his brothers and cousins—the first of his generation in the Bruni and Mazzone families—to throw a wedding for a daughter, and he wanted everyone to see that he was doing it in style.

“Carolyn, did you have some pasta?” he asked Aunt Carolyn, nudging her pesto-ward.

He directed one platter of hors d’oeuvres toward Grandma’s brother Agostino and another toward Grandma’s sister-in-law Florence, saying to them, “Ma would have loved this, don’t you think?” She would have. Not a minute of the event went by without my thinking that, and I didn’t have to check with any of my uncles, aunts or siblings to know that not a minute went by without their thinking that, too.

Dad was part conductor and part shepherd, his mission to make sure people got as much food and drink as they could handle and then got some more. Bunched up in his dark tuxedo, he moved in abrupt bursts, his upper body tilted slightly forward, the way it always did when he was nervous or rushed, and his hands balled into fists.

He was a creature of such fierce, fierce pride, so clearly his mother’s son, hypervigilant about the face he showed the world, keenly attuned to what the world might be thinking of him and his family. When I’d been in school and he’d insisted on As or betrayed disappointment at a slow time in a swim meet, he wasn’t just trying to make sure I did my best and got as far as I might want to in life. He was also mourning an aura of perfection I’d just sullied.

And yet his attention to that aura didn’t extend to how I looked, or rather to whether I was showing the world a figure as handsome and fit as I could be. Unlike Mom, who chose not to recognize or reconcile the contradiction of shoving food at me one day and a diet book the next, Dad never nagged me about my eating and never said much of anything when I gained weight. He never nagged Adelle, either. I always wondered: Was it because the notion of plenty was so central to his conception of taking care of people—of having the economic wherewithal to do so? Because he saw a joy in my eating that he couldn’t bring himself to challenge? Or because he understood what it was like to be weak around food, which was what he often used to relieve all the pressure he put on himself?