Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (24 page)

For a man so image-conscious, he was an awful dieter, still carrying around appreciably more weight than he should. He didn’t try to hide his zest for food. And he goaded the people around him to demonstrate the same kind of enthusiasm.

“Did you have enough to eat?” he asked a business associate he had invited to Adelle’s wedding. He unclenched one of his balled fists to pat the associate on the back. “Have some more, before we get called in to dinner.”

“This isn’t the dinner?” the business associate asked.

“Of course not!” Dad said, feigning surprise at the question, which was precisely the question he expected and wanted to get.

I parked myself near the vodka station, where Mom whizzed by me at one point. I nodded toward it and flashed a confused expression at her.

“We’re suddenly Russian?” I teased.

“Look how many people are crowding around it!” she shot back. “Vodka’s what all the young people drink.” I could tell she was feeling very with-it and in-touch and of-the-moment and maybe a few other hyphenated phrases connoting keen, boundary-traversing generational empathy.

She looked fantastic, her smile turned up as high as it went, her dark green dress bringing out the steely blue of her eyes, which were aglow from the privilege and power trip of being the mistress of ceremonies, the mother of the bride. Actually, she looked fantastic and terrible at the same time, but the terrible part we all tried to edit out of our mental pictures of her, because the terrible part was the cancer’s doing. She was thin, too thin, by any standard: a good five pounds shy of anything healthy. Her face was gaunt and her arms were spindly, and that hadn’t been the case after the first or second or even third round of chemo. But all of it was catching up to her now, six years into the two years her doctors had said she could hope to live.

She was exhausted, she was defiant. Here she was celebrating a family milestone that she wasn’t supposed to be around to see, and another milestone was within reach. Sylvia was pregnant, and it was beginning to show: Mom’s first grandchild was on the way. She was determined to hold that baby and confident that she had a will steely enough to guarantee herself the experience, but she wasn’t sure about much after that. With increasing frequency she reminded me that I’d promised not to let her suffer if things were headed in that direction, to make sure it was fast at the end. I murmured the proper assurances and nodded the proper assent, though I had no idea if or how I could follow through, and Mom hadn’t mapped out any kind of scenario. It was just this vague, chilling understanding we had.

I paid the vodka station more attention than anything else at the wedding, trying to find a Dostoevsky-esque grandeur in my apprehension and sadness, wondering how many glasses of vodka on the rocks erased a parent’s terminal illness, and how many more erased my own fickleness (had I been fickle?) and disloyalty and selfishness (was I guilty of these, too?) in beating such a decisive retreat out of Detroit and away from Greg. And what about the worry I felt every time I walked into the
Times
building, a worry that never wholly abated and was with me even now? How many glasses of vodka for that?

 

 

 

 

On the work front, the three months since I’d left Detroit had been miserable. I arrived at the
Times
having not handled a concise, straightforward news story in about three years, but these were the kinds of stories that I’d signed up for and that were instantly thrown at me. I reported and wrote them in a state of dread, and after filing them, I sometimes watched as an editor recast the first sentences and lopped off every other sentence after that and made the fifth and sixth paragraphs the tenth and eleventh paragraphs and then struck the last two hundred words, dismissing them as long-winded effluvium. The newspaper published a few articles under my byline that bore only an oblique relationship to what I’d actually handed in.

Assignment after assignment seemed like an invitation to failure or an exercise in near-catastrophe. I was sent out to the Hamptons to cover raging wildfires and told to interview homeowners either fleeing from their homes, refusing to budge or coming back in tremulous states to appraise the wreckage. But every time I got near a neighborhood in the fire zone, I encountered a police barricade and was turned back. Radio reporters and wire service reporters, however, were getting precisely the sorts of scenes and interviews I wasn’t—what trick wasn’t I figuring out? When I finally did reach a threatened neighborhood and set foot on the front lawn of one of the houses, a large, snarling dog rushed at me and sank its teeth into my right thigh before I could back away. I limped into the newspaper’s offices back in Manhattan that night with ripped, bloodstained pants. I went into the men’s room, looked in the mirror and thought:
That’s about right
. The way I looked matched the way I felt. I was a mess through and through.

For a few weeks after I landed in New York, Greg and I talked on the phone as often as every other night. Not talked: negotiated, needled, nitpicked and ultimately shouted. Tense discussions about who should get which lamp and how much he should pay me for my equity in the house led to pettier, nastier dissections of our sex life or of our friends, he claiming never to have liked most of mine, I claiming in return never to have liked any of his.

And if these interchanges came at the end of one of my more nerve-racking days at the
Times
, I’d find myself rushing out the door afterward to a nearby bodega—for beer, for chips, for ice cream, for all of it—or riffling through a stack of delivery menus. Delivery menus! Manhattan was the mother lode of them: Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Lebanese, any
-ese
there was. Also Mexican and Italian and Thai, not to mention Indian and Peruvian and Cuban. Every day a new menu appeared just inside the front door of my Uptown apartment near Columbia University, slipped through the crack underneath the door by unseen underminers, a multipaged message for the shut-in binger:
Psst. Have I got something delicious for you!
I called the numbers on the menus, counted the minutes until the doorbell rang and then opened the door wide to enchiladas and empanadas, satays and spring rolls.

It was a fast, easy, certain source of pleasure, not dependent on the assent or participation of anyone else. I’d spread the cartons and tins of food on the living room coffee table so I could survey and size up the bounty. I’d put on sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt: nothing that could cinch or cling. I’d put something trashy and brainless on television, maybe one of those women-in-peril movies starring Veronica Hamel or Markie Post. And the world would shrink to just a few square feet around me and to the warm, uncomplicated, unremarkable ripple of gratification running through me.

Sometimes I bopped from my apartment down to Chelsea, where my old roommate Martin had moved and was now living with a new roommate but without his menagerie, its members having either died or gone to live with friends. But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t tap back into the silliness that had always been our special glue. I didn’t go to gay bars and didn’t date and didn’t think about doing either. The ugliness of those final conversations with Greg—before we finally agreed on the lamps and the money and declared a truce—put me off the very ideas of sex or romance the way being stung by a jellyfish puts a toddler off the ocean. I now knew the perils and the price. I wasn’t about to dip in again anytime soon.

And I used this break as an allowance to eat more, which in turn became an added reason to extend the break. I wasn’t really thinking so much as pressing forward, day by day, not letting things get completely out of hand but not taking charge of them, either.

Central Park was close enough that I went for occasional runs there, even pushing those runs to as many as six miles on rare, guilt-stricken occasions, usually the mornings after I’d assembled and worked my way through an especially large coffee-table feast. I joined a gym four blocks from my apartment, but it was a tiny second-floor room with only a small assortment of weight machines and a total of three treadmills. I didn’t like going there, so I didn’t go often. I pledged to find a new gym, a motivating gym, a gym that would imbue me with the exercise ethic I wanted and currently lacked. I’d do that next week, or next month—soon enough. I wasn’t in any rush. I was on my break. I needed and deserved it.

 

 

 

 

In March 1996, Sylvia and Harry had a girl, and they named her Leslie, after Mom. Another Leslie Bruni. Harry was working in Manhattan and living just outside the city, sort of halfway to Scarsdale, in Mount Vernon, so I saw a lot of little Leslie in her first weeks and months. I made a point of it. I couldn’t get my fill of carrying her around and rocking her and trying to teach her words long before it was time for that.

“You’re talking to her in both English
and
Spanish, right?” I asked Sylvia, who had grown up speaking Spanish, the language of her Cuban parents, at home.

“I think it’s a little early for that,” she answered, noting that Leslie hadn’t yet mastered the art of holding her own head up or sitting. Verb conjugations were a ways away.

“But you
will
do that, won’t you?” I pushed. I wanted Leslie to be bilingual. I wanted her to be anything that would make her stand out and give her an edge and increase the odds that happiness would be hers.

“Yes,
yes
,” Sylvia said.

“Harry, you’ll watch? You’ll make sure?” I was crossing into obnoxiousness. So be it.

“You have to try this cab-merlot blend,” Harry said, pouring me a glass of wine. He was becoming a wine geek. But his actions at this moment were more about changing the subject, getting me to let up.

“
Cómo estás?”
I said to little Leslie, on her back on the family room carpet with her pudgy arms clawing at the air, her pudgy legs kicking it.

“Unbelievable,” I heard Harry mutter from a dozen feet away, where he hurriedly poured the wine for me.

“Maybe,” I said, “I should speak to her in Italian.” I’d studied it for two and a half years in college and had a decent arsenal of sentences and phrases. “
Come va,
my little Peanut?” That was one of our nicknames for her.

The intensity of my response to her was more like a father’s than an uncle’s, and mixed into it somewhere and somehow was the thought of losing Mom. That was clear to me even then. When Harry and Sylvia asked me to be little Leslie’s godfather, the high I felt easily beat any I’d ever gotten from a swimming victory, a long run or my Mexican speed.

Meanwhile Mark’s wife, Lisa, had announced that she was pregnant. Due date: late November, another marker for Mom to shoot for. It was as if her children had entered into this reproductive tag-team conspiracy to keep her going, to make it impossible for her to leave. There would certainly be more grandchildren after these first two: Harry and Sylvia and Mark and Lisa had made clear that they weren’t planning small families, and Adelle and Tom had yet to get into the act. Mom had to stick around to spoil all of these grandchildren. She had to stick around to feed them.

Because Lisa was going to be delivering right around Thanksgiving, Mom and Dad and the rest of our immediate family decided we’d spend Thanksgiving Day at her and Mark’s house in the suburbs of Boston, either greeting their newborn or awaiting the baby’s any-second-now arrival. Mom was no longer hosting Thanksgiving; Aunt Carolyn had taken it over when Mom and Dad moved to California, too far away to stay in the family-holiday-hosting rotation. So we made our apologies to her and Uncle Mario, letting them know we’d be back (and more numerous by one) the following year. And we made our arrangements to travel to Boston.