Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions (7 page)

Plus I'm also vegetarian.

That means there's one thing I can eat.

But I don't know what it is.

I had gone on the South Beach Diet before, but that's kind of meaty, and I'd read a book called
Wheatbelly
about eating less wheat, but I didn't think that would help, since I had an
EverythingBelly.

So I tried to cut down on my caloric intake and had a hard-boiled egg for breakfast, a bowl of soup for lunch, and a kale salad for dinner.

What happened?

I couldn't stick to the diet, and after a week, I was eating tons of pasta for dinner, and for dessert, dumping raw sugar in my coffee and practically bathing in salted caramels from Whole Foods.

Whoever invented putting salt on sweets was an evil genius.

I gained two pounds.

And I began craving salty/sweet things at night.

Like Bradley Cooper.

Just kidding.

Kind of.

I tried to educate myself on nutrition by ordering more books and watching an online video by a Dr. Robert Lustig, called
Sugar: The Bitter Truth.
And I learned that instead of blaming the snow, I should have been blaming the sugar.

The video had been viewed 4,359,323 people, which meant I was the 4,359,324th to learn the following:

Sugar is bad. Don't eat sugar. Fructose is bad. Don't eat fruct.

Ghrelin is the hunger hormone, and fructose does not suppress ghrelin. Nothing suppresses ghrelin except salted caramels.

Fructose is not glucose even though they rhyme.

Leptin is a hormone that tells your brain you're full. I suspect I am fresh out of leptin, and they don't sell it at Whole Foods.

And the bitter truth?

I need something else to blame.

The sweet truth?

I have a sweet tooth.

 

Still Here, Kitty?

By Francesca

For the first two days of my new life as a cat-owner, I did not see my cat. Just take my word for it, I had one, an absentee cat named Mimi, not that she answers to it. I knew she existed because the kitty litter was periodically disturbed, but it could've been my dog, Pip, working on a Zen garden.

I recently repo'd one of our family cats from my mom in order to catch a particularly audacious mouse terrorizing my apartment. But by the time I arrived with my feline assassin, the mouse had already succumbed to the square of Hershey's I had set upon a wooden trap.

Death by chocolate.

So now I have a cat and no mice.

But you're already one step ahead of me, aren't you?

Very early in the morning, three days after I brought Mimi home, I woke to find her making a little bed on my tummy. I petted her head, pleased that she had finally decided to make friends. After a few minutes, I got up in the dim blue morning light and padded barefoot across the room to the bathroom. Then I hopped back into bed, disappointed that the cat had now disappeared. I put on my glasses to check what time it was. In doing so, a small gray lump on the rug came into focus.

Another mouse.

A dead one.

Smack-dab in the middle of the path to the bathroom, and yet by some miracle, I hadn't stepped on it.

Have you ever doubted if there is a God? Well, now you know.

I woke up my boyfriend. I'm not squeamish, but there was no way I was letting him sleep through this.

Why do we have boyfriends if not to take care of dead mice?

“Wow,” he said, peering over at it. “This is a clean kill!”

“Don't look at it, honey, it's sad.”

His boyish enthusiasm continued. “No blood at all! She must have broken its neck with one bite.”

Mimi, the hired hit cat. No pleasure, no mistakes.

My boyfriend scooped the mouse into a trash bag and said he'd take it out.

“Wait,” I said. “If you're taking it out, let me clean the litter box.”

So the mouse was laid to rest, buried beneath the excrement of its killer.

I guess Mimi and I both are pretty cold.

But this early success made me cocky. A few days later, I caught sight of the varmint perched atop my dog's dish in the kitchen. We both froze. Then the mouse darted beneath my oven, a dead end.

I thought,
Where is the frigging cat?

Only my dog sat nearby. I grabbed him, threw him into my small galley kitchen, and barricaded him inside with a wall of dining chairs. He plopped down right in front of the oven and smiled at me, tail wagging across the floor.

He was completely unaware that we had a hostage situation—and he was my gunman.

Every operation needs a dopey-but-loyal thug.

Angel-faced killer

With Pip unwittingly guarding the exit, I ran in search of the cat. I looked under the couch, between the bookshelves, behind the curtains. In my closet, I army-crawled over the piles of shoes that lined the floor, I shifted all the hangers in case she had latched onto one like forgotten dry-cleaning.

No cat.

I ran back to the kitchen and opened a can of tuna.

“Meow?” Mimi suddenly materialized behind me.

But the cat was now too distracted to notice any mouse. I scooped up the cat, threw the tuna in the fridge, and set her down in front of the oven. The mouse was still under there, cowering in the corner. I tried to draw Mimi's attention to it.

Have you ever tried directing a cat?

Then you're a step ahead of me again.

I batted a plastic tab from a milk jug around and shot it underneath the oven; Mimi sniffed the air for more tuna.

I grabbed the cat-dancer toy and made it do a jig before flicking the feathered end under the oven, like fly-fishing for mice; Mimi started cleaning her paws.

I tried to gently angle Mimi's face down to be eye level with the mouse; she took to it like a wild mustang to a halter.

I realized I had only one option left, and it was a gamble. I'd have to scare the mouse out so she would see it. Mimi Bourne could take it from there.

So I got flat on my belly, once again eye-to-beady-eye with a rodent, and I used the long stick of the cat dancer to reach the mouse.

Mind you, I would also be scaring it
toward
my face. But with my finger hooked in Mimi's collar, I knew she had my back.

I touched the mouse with the stick, the mouse shot forward, I flew back by sheer force of terror and Mimi …

Mimi missed it completely. She was so freaked out by my behavior, she jumped up on the counter, out of the kitchen, and disappeared again.

So I have a cat and a mouse in my house.

I just don't know where.

 

Dr. Mother Mary

By Lisa

Mother Mary went to the hospital this week, where she was probably the only person admitted wearing a lab coat.

Physician, heal thyself.

You may not know that Mother Mary wears a lab coat all the time, though she's no doctor. She buys them at the Dollar Store and says she likes having all those pockets.

I'm sure that surgeons feel the same way. But who says you need a medical degree to like pockets?

Lab coats for everyone!

By the way, she's already home from the hospital, so don't worry.

I'll worry enough for both of us.

We begin the story by telling you that last week, she was fine. In fact, my brother Frank sent me a photo of them both, out to dinner. And yes, she wore her lab coat, because I don't make anything up.

I may be the author, but my family does all the writing.

The day after they sent me the photo, I called Mother Mary to say hi, and she was enjoying a visit with her speech therapist, Dorian. You may remember that she has been having speech problems since her stroke, though she still curses like a champ.

Mother Mary remains fluent in profanity.

Thank God the best swearwords are one syllable.

Anyway, that's how I know she's doing fine. If I ask her too many questions about her health, she'll tell me to go to hell.

Yay!

Anyway, Speech Therapist Dorian comes to see her three times a week, and she adores him. She always tells me how nice he is to her, and she always does her homework for him, practicing her vowel sounds from flash cards, just to make him happy.

Bottom line, Mother Mary has a crush on Speech Therapist Dorian.

It's not therapy, it's dating.

At least in her mind.

This is especially so because he's Chinese, and Mother Mary has a thing for Asian men.

Don't ask why, because I have no idea. All I know is that she always adored my father's old college friend Pete Ong. That was sixty-odd years ago, and it never stopped. He may well have been Japanese or Korean, we'll never know, but it's all the same to her.

Pete Ong, wherever you are, call her.

It's a sure thing, if you catch my drift.

To stay on point, the first time she met Speech Therapist Dorian, she called me afterwards and told me that he was Chinese, which is either his nationality or her code for superhot.

Plus I've seen a photo of Dorian, and he is superhot.

She may be ninety, but she's still kicking.

And she may have cataracts, but she ain't blind.

In fact, she's so crazy about him that she put him on the phone with me when I called her last week. “Hi, Dorian,” I said. “How's she doing?”

“Great,” he answered cheerfully. “Also, she wants me to tell you I'm Chinese.”

I'm not making this up, either.

This actually happened, I swear.

Mother Mary forgets I know he's Chinese, so she had to have him remind me.

Now
there's
an aspect of old age nobody ever tells you about.

You forget your fetishes.

Anyway, she was fine until one day, she told my brother Frank that some prune juice she drank “went down the wrong pipe” and now she's having trouble breathing.

Thank God, he takes her to the hospital right away, because we both know that although Dr. Mother Mary has a lab coat, she lacks the medical degree.

Or the plumbing license.

Anyway, she was admitted for observation and testing, and they found and drained some fluid from around her heart, which is no laughing matter.

We know she has heart issues, though she has more heart than anyone I've ever known.

So Brother Frank is keeping an anxious eye on her, and God bless the caregivers.

He's a great son and brother, and she couldn't be in better hands. Nor would she want to be.

Except maybe Dorian's.

 

I'm What's Cooking

By Lisa

This is about food.

Because I'm on a diet.

Since I can't have food, it's all I think about.

I've been working a lot and I keep the TV on in my office when I work. And everything on TV is about food.

In other words, it's TV's fault I gained a permanent ten pounds.

Half the shows on TV are cooking shows, and I watch every one of them. Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain, Martha Stewart, Lydia Bastianich, Mike Colameco, the Barefoot Contessa, and Nigella Lawson. Then there are cooking shows with multiple chefs, like
The Chew.
At night there so many chef shows, the chefs have to compete to stay on the shows, and if they lose, they pack their knives and go.

But not really, because there's always another show to replace them, with cooking.

And whether it's daytime or nighttime, every talk show will have a cooking segment, so you can watch comedians and actresses whip up chicken cacciatore. They serve the audience the food, and everyone munches away while the cooking continues.

Hungry yet?

In between the cooking segments are food commercials, whether it's the latest frozen food or a Seafood Shanty, Olive Garden, McDonald's, Burger King, Carrabba's, Outback Steakhouse, or Domino's Pizza.

Yes, they deliver.

To your mouth.

And hips.

I know there are channels dedicated to round-the-clock food programming, but what I'm trying to tell you is that all of the channels are food channels. And all the food shows, restaurants, and recipes are trying to solve the problem every mom seems to have every night, which is what to have for dinner.

Let me tell you how Mother Mary solved that problem.

She made spaghetti with tomato sauce, or gravy, as everybody knows it should be called. And on the side, she served an iceberg salad dressed with oil and vinegar.

Do you understand what I'm saying? We had the same thing for dinner, every night of my life.

I'm not complaining.

Who doesn't love spaghetti?

Plus Mother Mary made the best gravy in the world. She slow-cooked a big pot of it on Sunday and parceled it out all week, over five nights of having spaghetti.

And iceberg lettuce? Love it. It's crunchy water.

Great if you're hungry. Or thirsty.

Come Saturday night we ate hoagies, pizza, or cold spaghetti.

Not kidding.

And on Sunday we had a big meal that was ravioli, with a side of spaghetti.