Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (6 page)

I used to think of myself as low-maintenance. I used to believe I was easy to please. But now I know better.

Starbucks taught me the truth.

My order at Starbucks is a vente iced green-tea latte, breve, no melon syrup, light ice. I love my drink. It’s a treat I give myself a few times a week. I give myself all manner of food rewards, because I’m an emotional eater. Can you think of a better reason to eat?

But back to Starbucks. I was standing in line behind a tall sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte with nonfat milk no-whip, who was standing behind a grande iced non-fat no-whip mocha. When it came to my turn, I gave my order and watched my hard-working barista like a disapproving mother, to make sure he didn’t add the melon syrup.

One time, my barista made a mistake and added the melon syrup. I took a sip and then threw the entire drink away. I won’t drink it with the melon syrup. And I couldn’t bring myself to ask the barista to redo it, because I couldn’t admit to him or myself that I’d become a woman who refuses to drink something that isn’t exactly the way she wants it.

But I have.

I always order salads with the dressing on the side and no croutons. I always use Splenda and not Equal. I like Half-and-Half or light cream in my coffee, but not milk. I like strawberry preserves, but don’t come near with me with strawberry jelly.

How did I get like this?

I was standing in Whole Foods the other day, mesmerized by the yogurt. I used to be fine with normal vanilla yogurt, then I switched to strawberry. But here I was, dazzled in the dairy aisle, astounded by white yogurt containers gleaming like pearls on a strand. There was normal yogurt from cows, but there was also goat’s milk yogurt, buffalo milk yogurt, nonfat yogurt, low-fat yogurt, and yogurt in a bottle, so you could drink it. There was yogurt with normal bacteria and yogurt with special bacteria.

Uh-oh. I had no idea how to choose bacteria. Generally, bacteria is the kind of thing I like to avoid.

In short, I could have it the way I wanted, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted it. Then I started to wonder about when all these choices began, and when we started to customize germs.

Maybe it goes back to Burger King’s “Have it Your Way” campaign. Before then, back when we didn’t know better, we ate hamburgers with whatever they put on them. The Burger King campaign was a response to McDonald’s “Have it Our Way” approach, which meant that every burger came with a pickle, ketchup, and chopped onion bits.

In those days, if you didn’t like the pickle, you were forced to take matters into your own hands. You had to handle the situation all by yourself. You had to take the pickle off.

Likewise, if you didn’t like ketchup, you had to cope. You either had to eat your hamburger with the ketchup and try to live another day, or you had to find yourself a plastic knife and scrape that ketchup right off.

We were like MacGyver then, full of ingenuity.

But those days are over. We started having it our way and we never stopped. And somewhere along the line, there sprung up 300 million choices for every product, and I became the pickiest person on the planet.

That’s it. It must be Burger King’s fault. Because it can’t be mine.

But here’s the hard question: Have all these choices made us happier? Am I really, truly, happier for all of those choices?

Absolutely.

I love it. I love having everything exactly the way I want it. I work hard to earn the money to buy myself my food rewards. I’m like a puppy giving myself Milk Bones—which come in cheese, liver, and regular flavor.

And I even love the dairy aisle, dazzling me with choice. When I clap eyes on all those yogurts, my heart swells with pride. I’m lucky to live in a country armed with powerful marketing weapons, all of which are aimed at little old me. They’ve succeeded in convincing me that there really is a difference between these products, and that the difference is critical.

And so I choose.

In fact, I’m going to start sampling soon, and in a week or so, I’ll have selected my absolute favorite bacteria.

I hope it comes in hazelnut.

Recently, I went to the movies and saw one of the worst movies ever. But I had a great time, for one reason:

Movie candy.

I used to think that I loved the movies, but I realized what I love is movie candy.

What’s so great about movie candy is that I allow myself to have it at all. I’m in carb rehab, so I’d never eat popcorn at home. Nor would I ever eat candy, normally. But at a movie, I’m allowed to get popcorn and candy, both. In fact, I’m entitled. A movie theater is Switzerland of the diet world.

The same goes for portion control. I’m careful about my portions, but not at the movies. All movie candy has one portion size. Two hours.

Movie popcorn isn’t food, it’s gambling. You never know if you’ll win or lose. Most often, you lose, because movie popcorn can taste like blown-in fiberglass insulation or paper, salted. Sometimes you win, and get a bag like I had the other night—a lovely canary gold, freshly popped, tasting of real Jersey corn. That’s one win in forty-odd years of movie popcorn. Yet, gambler that I am, I know that I’ll hit the jackpot again someday. That’s why I keep playing movie popcorn.

In contrast, the appeal of movie candy is its very predictability. If movie popcorn is a date, movie candy is a marriage. It always tastes the same, so much so that you can have a certain go-to movie candy for years. Raisinets has been my favorite movie candy for the past decade. It never disappoints. It always tastes chewy, soft, chocolaty, and vaguely healthy. My relationship to Raisinets has lasted longer than both my marriages, and cost me far less.

Before Raisinets, for me there was only Goobers, again for almost ten years. It wasn’t cheating to switch from Goobers to Raisinets, because both are in the same movie candy food group, namely Chocolate Contaminated by Natural Foods.

The decade before that, I always went with Whoppers, which were from a related food group, Chocolate Contaminated by Unnatural Foods.

I used to love Whoppers, chocolate-covered malted milk balls that come in a faux milk carton, a reminder of their fauxdairy origins. I stopped eating Whoppers only when I kept encountering what daughter Francesca calls the Dead Whopper.

The Dead Whopper looks alive on the outside—smooth, round, shiny, and almost brown. But as soon as you bite down, you know. The Dead Whopper collapses instead of crunching, and flattens to a gummy rock. It doesn’t taste like chocolate, it just tastes brown. And there you are, stuck with a cheekful of Dead Whopper and no napkin. It takes trust to eat candy in pitch darkness, and the Dead Whopper breaks its vows.

So I divorced Whoppers. I aim for quality control in my candy marriages.

Back in my youth, my movie candy came only from the High Maintenance Group, composed of Jujyfruits, Dots, and the immortal Jujubes. This group contains fruit plastic pressed
into unrecognizable shapes and tinted the color of unpopular crayons. I used to love candy from this group because I was younger and had more time to deal with their candy drama.

The High Maintenance Group required a do-it-yourself dental scaling, right there in the movie seat, with your fingernail. It was labor intensive, not to mention disgusting. Picking your teeth and eating what you retrieve is acceptable only for eight-year-olds and under.

The High Maintenance Group also required you to hold the candy up to the movie screen to determine its color/flavor. I can’t tell you how many movies I saw through a Lysol-yellow Jujyfruits filter. I liked only the red and black Jujyfruits, so I had to perform the ritual of finding them by the light of the screen, then dumping the orange, green, and yellows back into the box. In no time, only the colors I hated were left, so I had to rank them, then eat them in descending order of hate.

It required a lot of decision-making, for a candy.

No candy was more high maintenance than Jujubes, the founding candy of the group. I think they may be defunct now, because I never see Jujubes at the movies anymore. I admired Jujubes for their moxie, not to mention their enigmatic name. They weren’t people-pleasers, like Raisinets. Jujubes dared you to like them. They made too much noise, as if they wanted out of their narrow box. They could crack a molar. Their colors were profoundly ugly. They tasted like drill bits.

And you know what?

I miss them.