Eating Ice Cream With My Dog (36 page)

“It would have taken all night,” Lindsay said, “and I’d already set my mental alarm clock for ‘early’ so I could take a walk around the neighborhood at my own speed, then read my book over the biggest cup of coffee to be had and a fresh hot bagel at that little place on the main street.”

Mimi smiled benignly. “And I slept in. We both got what we wanted.” She reached and picked up a little blue enamel box, opened it and inspected its contents of paper clips. “I could never live here,” Mimi said. “But you know, as crammed as the Bat Cave is in the daytime, it has a womblike quality at night.”

“And now?” I asked.

“The next morning, the Bat Cave has no breakfast in it.”

As I led them off to my favorite diner, I thought about them nestling into the pillows and quilts and I knew that just as Lindsay’s eyes grew too heavy to keep open, Mimi would have said softly, as she had to me so many nights on the phone, “Good night, lovey. Sweet dreams.” I wished I’d been there.

Lindsay busted into the Bat Cave in triumph.

“Two pairs of shoes!” she said excitedly. “That is a fabulous shop.” She stopped short and looked at Wendy, playing Scrabble on my computer. “Wendy! Hi!”

“Hi! It’s good to see you—”

The word
again
hung in the air like a balloon. Everyone laughed and the moment passed. This was going to be fine, I thought to myself. Each of us had thought the same thing—that we were already so familiar with each other that Lindsay’s skipped “It’s good to meet you” was completely natural. No one felt compelled to say this out loud.

“You’ve
got
to see these shoes!” Lindsay said.

Wendy towered over Lindsay and diminutive Mimi when she stood up for the unveiling. Rawboned and thick-haunched, she made me feel small, which is saying something. I’m five foot eight and that day, I weighed 220 pounds. Wendy’s need to watch our lips was unnerving, and I wondered how much she hadn’t heard already.

“Ooooh…” she cooed. “You got them around here?”

“Did you pay cash and get the discount?” I asked.

“No, and I pretty much shot my wad for the trip, but look!”

“They’re gore-jus,” Wendy said. Her speech was slightly thick, with a tinny upper register, and her drawl was as prodigious in person as it was on the phone. “Can we go there? Now?”

“Of course!” Lindsay laughed happily. “Shoe shopping is better than therapy! And the owner asked me how long I’ve lived in the Heights! Isn’t that cool? You’re gonna love this neighborhood, Wendy. It’s so homey.”

“I already do,” Wendy said. “It’s like I fell into an Edith Wharton novel.”

I scratched Daisy’s ears as they headed out to look at shoes on Montague Street. They were happy. I had one last dog walk and then I’d take Wendy over to my friends’ house. If all went well, I’d be in bed by nine o’clock.

The next morning, Mimi and Lindsay told Wendy and me about their excursion to the Empire State Building.

“I hope you’re not pissed off that we went without you,” Lindsay said.

“
It was a last-minute decision,” Mimi added, “and it was eight thirty. We know Frances goes to bed at sunset, and I didn’t want to disturb Wendy’s hosts by her coming in late.”

“That’s okay,” Wendy said in the three-note singsong that suggested she was forgiving rather than understanding them. Then again, Wendy had said all along that she was keen on museums rather than tourist sights.

I was relieved. They’d done a big New York Thing and I hadn’t had to endure the wait.

“How long was the line?” I asked.

“Long. My back hurt,” Mimi admitted. “My knees hurt. But it was fun.” She slapped the menu down. “I want French toast. What are you guys having?”

“Whatever you do,” I said, “you have to have the potato pancakes. Teresa’s is famous for them.”

“Then I’ll have a Cheddar cheese omelet,” Lindsay decided. “With a cinnamon raisin bagel.”

“And I’ll have the Swiss cheese omelet,” I said.

Wendy had waited us out and continued to study the menu. “Maybe Ah’ll just have the fruit since we’re getting potato pancakes.”

Lindsay groaned and looked at Mimi to do the dirty work.

“We’re not counting points, Wen. Order what you want.”

“D’y’all think it’s too early for chicken livers and french fries?”

Mimi made a face of distaste but laughed. “I was worried about whether everyone was going to count my points, too.”

“I’ve been too hungry to even really look at what anyone else is eating.” Lindsay laughed.

“Did you know there are ten million bricks in the Empire State Building?” Mimi said as she reached into her bag for her camera. She turned it on and handed it to Wendy to scroll through the pictures. There she was, my twinkling city. Mimi had zoomed in on the Verrazano Bridge, the lovely double-strand of jade; on the Brooklyn Bridge, a rope of diamonds; on the Manhattan Bridge, sapphires and pearls. The Chrysler Building poked its churchy spire out of the other million lights. The city was like the most elegant cocktail dress, black, gold, pale green.

Last of all was a picture of Lindsay, her hair blowing in the wind, her black T-shirt showing a sliver of belly, her shirt and blazer meeting in a rectangle of cleavage. She is smiling and has the languid, sleepy sexiness of Jane Russell.

She looked as proud and pleased in that photo as the skyscraper itself.

Thursday boded a change of weather and it had begun to rain when we left my favorite Szechuan dive at the end of Canal Street. We had to trudge down to Grand Street before I could hail a cab. I opened the front passenger door and suggested Mimi would be more comfortable there and Wendy, Lindsay, and I smashed ourselves together in the backseat. It was every fat woman’s nightmare—and every not-so-fat woman’s as well, it turned out. “The thing I remember most,” Lindsay told me months later, “was how big you all were. You were all hunched up and only spoke to give directions.”

“Because if we pinched ourselves together and didn’t breathe, we might seem smaller,” I told her.

Mimi’s face pinched a little more when we got out and saw the broad, long sweep of steps up to the Metropolitan Museum. When she came to New York for my birthday, we’d taken cabs to flat places. It had not prepared her, or her two replaced knees, for what we were doing on this trip.

I cringed at what I was making her do but tried to remind myself that you’d have to be dead not to love
something
in the Met, even if she or the others found themselves bored witless by the Rubenses.

It was a choice, when we left the lurid seventeenth-century Spanish painters behind us, between the
The Feast of Acheloüs
and
Venus and Adonis
.
The Feast of Acheloüs
is a cacophonous, sensual, bucolic version of
The Last Supper
, with three or four female nudes framing the central event.
Venus and Adonis
is three figures, of which the naked Venus is the most prominent. We chose Venus because she was the only woman in the painting and we could study her without the distraction of comparisons. It was also a more familiar story. The tragedy that was about to unfold was in the tensed muscles and gloomy forest behind Adonis, Venus, and Cupid.

We sat down on two of the benches and basked in it.

Our eyes were drawn first to Venus clutching Adonis’s arm to keep him from going to the hunt. They traveled up to her face next, taking in her cherry mouth and flow of curls, then down to the chubby Cupid clutching Adonis’s leg. Only then did we zero in on Adonis’s perfectly captured sort of galumphy youth and on Venus’s strong legs and dimpled knees.

Her knees that are the real deal, the signature of the twenty-first century’s definition of a “weight problem” and unacceptability.

“What size do you think she is?” I asked.

“An eighteen?” Mimi hazarded.

“I’m a size eighteen and she looks smaller than me,” I said doubtfully.

“I looked like her when I was a sixteen,” Lindsay said with some harshness. “I hated it.”

“But look at her, she’s beautiful,” I protested. Venus is no wimp in Rubens’s painting, but she is vulnerable. Her face is pleading but flawlessly pale with just the right blush of carnal vigor in her cheeks. In fact, she looked a lot like Mimi if Mimi had long curly hair. “Did you even
look
at your body then?” I went on.

“Yes. I would stand in front of the mirror and pick out every little flaw.”

Lindsay was adamant. She had shown herself to be the most balanced, the most emotionally and physically healthy, of us, not because she was thinner than us, but because she had built the certainty of grappling with difficulties into her life. That commitment to struggle was part of what made Lindsay a whole person. A tough marriage, yes, but she supported Jalen’s exercise addiction recovery wholeheartedly and took a searching look at her part in supporting his addiction. She loved her field of study and dissertation topic, was close to her family, went to parties thrown by friends or colleagues, had lunch every week with a close girlfriend, owned a home and planted flowers, attended her Spiritualist Church each week, came alive ten minutes into a run. I wasn’t jealous of her, but I was envious of how many quilt blocks her life was made up of and how well stitched together they were.

“And yet no one would say, ‘Venus could stand to lose a few,’” Mimi said.

“Was it social pressure that made you hate your body then?” I pushed Lindsay.

“No. I just did. I hated the bits and pieces, the bulges. I thought I was ugly.”

“Venus has lumpy thighs.” It was hard to tell whether Wendy was adding this to the discussion of Lindsay’s Rubenesque past or whether she couldn’t hear us and made an observation on her own.

“That’s all right for Venus,” Lindsay said. “But I wanted a straight up and down body.”

“Like a size ten?” I asked.

“Yes. Like everybody else.”

“So it
was
societal expectations,” I trumped her.

“Yes and no. I just wasn’t comfortable at a size sixteen.”

There was silence as we studied the painting further. Sadly, Wendy said, “She has ankles.”

“I have ankles.” I pull up the legs of my jeans.

Wendy and Mimi did the same. They had fence posts for ankles.

“But she has a waist,” I hastened to add. “Wendy has a waist.”

“She looks a lot older than Adonis,” Wendy said.

“Yeah, well, she’s a
goddess
,” Mimi protested. “She
was
older. Lots and lots older.”

“But the discrepancy in ages is really apparent,” Wendy said. “And Cupid is pretty chubby, too. It looks like Adonis really wants to get away from them.”

“Codependency or death?” I asked. “That was his choice.”

“When I was a sixteen, I didn’t have perky breasts or toned arms. She really fills her body out,” Lindsay said.

“She’s a goddess. Rubens might make her big, but he’s not going to give her droopy tits,” I answered.

“True. But the rest of her seems true to life. Big ass and thighs, smaller waist, broad shoulders, muscular arms.”

“Some people think Rubens’s women are like that because he used male models for his paintings,” Mimi told us. “She doesn’t look like she’s based on a male body, though. She’s got muscles in the right places and her fat is fat, not muscle.”

Wendy stood up and looked toward the jolly Hals and Watteaus that waited us. “Have you noticed that none of his nude women have nipples?”

We laughed and stood up. I needed to say hello to Caravaggio’s musicians, as beautiful as Adonis without his callowness, their corruption forced on them before they knew they were innocent rather than by the seduction of an almost-man who had only that skill left to learn.

By the time I got back from feeding the greyhounds, a hard wind had kicked up and the temperature was falling. Patty had arrived and Wendy, Mimi, and Lindsay had gone on strike against letting me pay for more meals. Tired and weather-weary, we agreed without words not to go back into the city for dinner after our burning ceremony.

Patty is the size and vividness of a hummingbird, likely to show up in emerald and rose, with a slash of amethyst for good measure. She is, always, a student, a little kerfuffled by the practicalities of life but absorbing the mysteries without trying to slot them into categories. At my best, I inspired her, and at my worst, I worried her a lot.

“So why are you in an eating disorders program?” Lindsay was saying as I came in. “You’re—
skinny
.” The word wasn’t necessarily a compliment.

“There are many ways to abuse yourself with food,” Patty said, and told them a little of her history.

“Hardcore, huh?” I asked as I fished around for pens and paper. Mimi would understand the ceremony as a cleansing, Lindsay as a freeing of the spirit. I agreed with the validity in their interpretations and, as a Catholic who knows how pagan her church essentially is, saw it as an oblation, sacrament, and intention all rolled into one nutty bit of theology.

I had wanted to burn our faults over the East River, letting the fire and ashes flow into the water and its ocean-bound currents, going for as many of the four elements as my patch of Brooklyn allowed, but the night was turning ugly. I couldn’t see putting Mimi through the twenty-block trip with a steep hill that would take us to Fulton Landing.

“The Promenade,” I said. “Nobody’s going to be there and there’s plenty of air and water now.”

Lindsay plucked the paper lei hanging from my desk lamp and put it on Daisy’s head. “Daisy will be our Good Fairy,” she said. “The one with no evil in her, dressed in the earth.” We laughed at the lopsided crown she wore with dignified aplomb.

We hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to get increasingly dampening paper to catch fire in the rain and wind. My thumb was singed and abraded from trying to keep my lighter lit. “We should give up,” I said after five minutes of this. “We can tear them up into little bits and throw them in the trash.” As we headed down the Pierrepont exit from the Promenade, my hair stopped whipping my eyes. I tried my lighter again. The slight shelter of bushes and trees by the playground was enough of a windbreak to keep it lit. One by one, we fed our desires into the flame, sometimes with an “Oh, shit!” when the wind caught the ragged burn and tore it into sudden flame.