Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (9 page)

 

7:30
P.M.—
Begin making doggie bags for all the guests. Include composed sandwiches in these bags: What if someone gets hungry on the drive back to New York? Include containers of manicotti, because there’s a lot of it left over. Do not include shrimp. They’ve been at room temperature too long and don’t travel so well.

 

8:00
P.M.
—Shoo Vicki and Carolyn out of the kitchen, where they’re furiously working to help you clean up, and tell them that you’ve got it all under control, that it’s going to be a snap, that the whole thing was a breeze and you’ve still got energy to burn. Hand guests their doggie bags as you kiss and hug them good-bye. Notice that only three yams went uneaten, and feel a knot in your stomach. Did you make too few? Might someone have forgone a yam for fear there wouldn’t be enough for others? Make a mental note: next year, more yams. And maybe also some lump crabmeat to go with the chilled shrimp. The appetizer hour needed a little something extra.

In the kitchen, Mom was a creature of habit, though the habits were sometimes short-lived. She would become fascinated for a span of months or maybe a whole year with a new dish, new sandwich or particular ingredient, celebrating it and toying with it until it finally I bored her and she moved on to the next thing.

Picasso had his blue period; Mom had her shrimp period. There was shrimp scampi, of course, which she made with generous measures of butter, garlic and shallots and just a bit of lemon juice and cayenne pepper. There was shrimp Creole—a casserole of sorts involving shrimp, rice, onion and lots of tomato—and there was another shrimp and rice combination, which I liked better, called shrimp Harpin. Shrimp Harpin’s superiority was easily explained. The recipe called for a cup of heavy cream, two tablespoons of butter, a half cup of slivered almonds and a half cup of dry sherry.

For a while Mom took to wrapping things in bacon. In fact she never completely stopped wrapping things in bacon, but there was definitely a phase of more aggressive, frequent, committed wrapping of things in bacon, and it was a happy phase indeed. If something could be wrapped in bacon, speared with a toothpick and broiled, she did precisely that, and usually served the results as canapés, disregarding the extent to which things wrapped in bacon might fill a person and diminish his or her readiness for the rest of the meal.

She wrapped chicken livers in bacon. Scallops, too. She wrapped water chestnuts in bacon, though I never really saw the point. When you had bacon on the outside of something, why put a vegetable on the inside? It struck me as a crucial loss of nerve.

She became obsessed for a while with club sandwiches, layered with bacon, and this was because of the pool that she and Dad decided to put in the forested yard behind our Avon house. It was a grand, ludicrous pool, out of sync with the family’s usually sensible spending habits, a splurge exponentially larger than anything before it. It was twenty yards long, so that Mark, Harry and I could do meaningful laps in it if we wanted. It resembled a lake, its outline curvy, its deck punctuated with enormous boulders that jutted toward, and hung slightly over, the water. Given all the money that had gone into it, Mom all but demanded, from mid-May to late September, that we get ourselves out there and
enjoy
it, and so she developed what she considered pool-friendly cuisine: guacamole with chips, crudité with dip. And club sandwiches.

The fact that they had turkey in them allowed her to tell herself that she was making something healthier than hamburgers or hot dogs. She always bought freshly carved turkey or cooked turkey breasts herself and carved them. She carefully toasted the white or wheat bread (her choice depended on her mood and dieting cycle) so that it was firm and golden brown, discarding slices that emerged from the toaster too dark. Then she’d cut the sandwiches into triangular quarters, crucial to her insistence that this was just piddling poolside finger food. A person could have just a quarter sandwich—just a nibble. Who was she kidding? No one in our family stopped at a quarter or even two quarters, and I usually didn’t manage to put the brakes on before five or six.

I had more discipline and did better with other things: chemistry, American history, Steinbeck, Wharton. At Loomis Chaffee, the private school outside of Hartford to which Mom and Dad sent us, I got As in almost all of my classes in the tenth and eleventh grades. I had editing positions on the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and, due to those activities and my continued participation in swimming, more friends than I’d ever had before. I was, as Mom and Dad had always prodded me to be, well-rounded. Only the rounded part—well, I felt that it applied to me just a little too literally.

I had either six or seven or twelve pounds that wouldn’t go away: I never knew exactly how many, because at a certain point I just stopped getting on scales. I didn’t like what they told me. I was about five feet ten, only three-quarters of an inch under what I’d grow to be, and according to those rigorous medical charts of ideal weights at certain heights, I should have been 170 pounds. But I often weighed above 180, and I could blame only some of those extra pounds on big bones and a genuinely broad frame.

During physicals in doctors’ offices, I averted my eyes from the scale and instructed the doctor not to tell me the number. Usually the doctor just chuckled as he wrote it on his chart. Sometimes he said, “I’d like it if you lost five to ten pounds.” He never said, “You’re fine the way you are.” I know because I listened for that—listened for some indication that I was wrong about myself.

Ten pounds: it wasn’t a disaster. I recognized that. But it was aggravating. Maddening. It was the distance between me and some confident, enviable, all-American ideal that might well be mine if I could just turn away from yet another quarter of club sandwich, from the third buttered yam at Thanksgiving, from the second bowl of ice cream I’d carry up to my bedroom—in Avon I had my own bedroom, connected to Mark’s by a shared bathroom—at eleven thirty on a weeknight when I was up late studying.

The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it—were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.

With 31s and 32s, I could wear whatever color and cut of shirt I wanted instead of the vertical stripes and the dark blues, browns and blacks that Mom said flattered me most. I could wear the madras sport jacket I’d tried on in a Hartford department store, the one she had told me wasn’t “particularly slimming,” or the kind of red plaid flannel shirt that was also—according to Mom, and according to the mirror—a sartorial no-no.

One of my best friends, Adrian, a fellow swimmer on the Loomis team whom I regularly harangued into going along with me to late movies on Friday or Saturday nights, had a shirt like that. But then he also had a thirty-one-inch waist, even though he stood three inches taller than I did, with broader shoulders.

On some of those Friday and Saturday nights, I’d get home after midnight and, though I’d had dinner earlier, grab two or three hamburger patties from the freezer in the garage, put them on a broiler pan and shove them under the broiler, flipping them as soon as I thought I could get away with it and leaving them on that second side for maybe five minutes tops.

My preference for rare burgers, by then established, started out as a matter not of taste but of haste. Rare burgers came soonest off the grill or out of the oven.

 

 

 

 

Partly because I tried not to, I was always thinking about food. Mark was always thinking about Amy, his girlfriend during his senior year at Loomis, which was my junior year. And since he and I shared the car for the half-hour drive between Avon and the Loomis campus, I spent almost as much time around her as he did.

Actually, I spent most of that time with her best friend, Ann, who kept me company while Mark and Amy stole away somewhere. In Amy’s house, Ann’s house, or a house that Amy frequently watched for friends of her family’s, Ann and I would listen to Neil Young’s
Harvest
or
After the Gold Rush
, to Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
and the Grateful Dead’s
American Beauty
, and eat toasted bagels with melted Havarti on them. Ann had introduced me to Havarti, flecked with dill. Like most such introductions, it went well.

“Where’s
your
girlfriend?” she asked me once. I sensed she could be trusted with the truth, which I hadn’t told anyone yet. I didn’t want a girlfriend, I confessed. I wanted a boyfriend.

“Mark doesn’t know?” she said. It was more statement than question. She could pretty much tell that was the case.

“No,” I said.

“Are you freaked out?” This one was a question, and she was asking about more than what Mark might learn and how he might react.

I said I wasn’t. It was nearing the end of junior year. I planned to bide my time until going off to college in about sixteen months. And I was going to make sure to choose a college in a decent-size city or with a big student body: a place where I’d be guaranteed to find other gay guys and might even have a boyfriend, maybe someone tall and thin and able to wear a red plaid flannel shirt like Adrian’s.

“And when you find him, are you going to hide behind the car to take your clothes off?” she asked. It was a reference to an episode she couldn’t stop ribbing me about. She and Amy had been with Mark and me in a parking lot where he and I had to change our shirts before meeting the rest of our family for dinner out. While Mark took off his T-shirt and put on a button-down in front of them, untroubled by their presence, I walked to the far side of the car and squatted slightly so I was completely hidden from them. The parking lot wasn’t a pool, and this wasn’t a swim meet: I didn’t have to let others see what paunch and love handles I still had.

The next fall Mark left for Amherst College, a sticker Mom was thrilled to put on the back window of her car. Harry joined me at Loomis as a freshman, becoming my new partner for the commute. He also became a new member of the swim team, of which I was now cocaptain, and decided to concentrate on diving instead of the other events: it suited his talent for solitary focus. But his real passion was
Star Trek
. He’d sometimes invite fellow “trekkies” from school to the house on weekends for all-night
Star Trek
viewing marathons.

I wrote letters to Ann, who had gone off to college in Washington, D.C. On weekend nights I hung out with Adrian, as much as he would let me. On weeknights at home I often tucked in Adelle, who was now eleven, and whose bed had a lacy, undulating canopy over it. I’d study that canopy as I snuggled with her and sang her my favorite slow songs from the radio. We’d been doing this for years and I could tell it was about to end: she liked it less than she had at eight. She was getting so much older so fast and in so many ways, including her growing worry about her weight, with which she struggled. That was part of our bond, part of what separated us from Mark and Harry.

But I couldn’t yet talk to her about the things I’d shared with Ann, and with Ann gone I needed a new confidante. Soon after the start of senior year, I got one. She turned out to be more than just a confidante. She was my unofficial diet guru.

B
eth came to Loomis as a senior, transferring from a public high school, to try to bolster her chances of getting into Yale, on which she’d set her sights. She was among the slight minority of Loomis kids who boarded there rather than living at home. She had to: her family’s house in southern Connecticut was nearly ninety minutes away.

She was a swimmer, a good one, and that was how we got to know each other. But I was drawn to her mainly because of her appearance: the oddity of it, the way it didn’t add up.

Her height matched mine: nearly five feet, eleven inches. Due to genes and sports, she had the broad shoulders and thick upper arms of a football player. The thighs, too. And though her stomach was flat, her waist was broad. That was the genes more than the sports. In some ways they’d been cruel to her.

In other ways they’d been magnificent. She had a gorgeous face. I once read a profile of the actress Elizabeth McGovern—I’m not sure if this was just before or just after I met Beth—and its writer described her as having skin so flawless a butterfly could skate on it. That was the skin Beth had. The curve of her jaw was sharp. Her cheekbones were high and the creamy flesh right below them slightly sunken. Her eyes were the color of a Tiffany box. And if she’d nudged her hair toward a pale shade seldom seen outside Scandinavian countries and strip clubs—well, didn’t eyes like hers call for blondness like that?

I picked up instantly on her awareness of the discrepancy between how she looked from the neck up and how she looked from the neck down. I recognized the signs. Like me she favored loose clothing. Like me she spent less time than other swimmers strolling around the pool deck in a bathing suit and hustled from the locker room into the water, or from the water to wherever a T-shirt or warm-up suit was waiting. In the school cafeteria she assembled strange combinations of food or walked the length of the salad bar rattling off the calorie counts of everything in it, citing one of the many nutrition books she’d read. She was waging a war with her body, and obviously felt estranged from it. I knew how that was.

My own anger at not being naturally thin—and at having this hunger that threatened to tug me ever further from thinness—opened the door to grievances over not being so many other things. I was unwilling to accept how slowly and lightly I tanned, so I bought a tiny, cheap sunlamp, put it on the desk in my bedroom and sat closer to it than the instructions deemed permissible, feeling the bulb’s fire on my face, which seemed to crackle. I sprayed store-bought bleaches in my hair, then blamed the brassy, uneven outcome on swimming pool chlorine. My class-mates bought the excuse, but Mom couldn’t abide the brassiness. She dragged me to her salon, saying that if I was intent on being a blond, I should at least be a credible, presentable blond, and she had her hairdresser frost my hair by pulling strands of it through this weird cap with scores of tiny holes. She dragged Beth along with us, having made the executive decision that Beth should have her own shade of platinum toned down.