Fat Chance (21 page)

M
aybe I'm never going to
not
think of eating and gratification in the same breath, but at least when I go out to eat now, I feel as though I'm holding the reins. I wanted to have an elegant lunch, and since there was no one to share the table with (I passed on lunch with the publicist for Godiva) I decide to enjoy my own company.

Going out to lunch alone at a restaurant that has starched white tablecloths and fresh flowers and waiters who keep their eye on the level of water in your glass, however, means assuming a role. You need to appear confident, secure, using body language that tells everyone around you that you're glad to be by yourself, you enjoy your own company and relish the privacy—isn't it such a rarity? Your carriage makes it clear that you are alone by design, not sheer desperation.

So I make a reservation at a favorite Italian restaurant where the maître d' is savvy enough to greet me with a warm smile instead of the dreaded “table for one?” I stride back to
a banquette along the wall, casually spread my napkin over my lap and raise my eyebrow to signal for the waiter. No, I didn't bring a book. I wasn't going to bury my head or distract myself. I was going to stay in the present. I order a mineral water, and then sit back and look around. Couples mostly, or groups of four. Business meetings, and one pair of starry-eyed hand-holders.

I think about Taylor—his face, then his body—and then push the thought out of my mind. I did the right thing leaving. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't cast off the image of myself as a Mike Taylor groupie. (He's so hot!) There could never be equal footing between us. The celebrity mythology was just too cosmic to go away. It would always feel like another world to me. And his fans would always have a greater claim on him than I would. How many women could he share himself with? The distance between us now helped my perspective.

I scan the menu. Clever eater that I am now, I took the bite out of my appetite before I left the office by having a large Granny Smith apple. Sanity would govern my choices. Salad to start, then chicken lemone with roasted potatoes. I close the menu. No need to dwell on the options. One of my pet peeves, in fact, is when people agonize over the choices, wringing their hands over what to have.

With one hand shielding the spray, I squeeze a wedge of lime into the sparkling water. The table looks art directed. The lime coordinates with the petite green-and-yellow pottery pitcher filled with yellow tulips, and next to it, a tall rectangular bottle of grass-green olive oil. I drizzle some out into a little platter, sprinkle it with chips of coarse salt, and then dip a wedge of thick-crusted Italian bread into the fragrant oil. A perfect marriage of tastes. Then, as if a magic spell had been cast over me, I sit back and feel immensely happy.

I'm transported by the surroundings to a small Tuscan hill town—a cerulean-blue-painted ceiling, terra-cotta floor tiles, and ochre walls. Businesses are closed for three hours—it's time for lunch and then siesta with work behind me. Such balance in one's life, such harmony.

I step out of my life and put things in perspective wondering how fate will resolve the conflicts in my life. I remember being a child and plucking a daisy—he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me. Now, though, I'm not sure how I want the game of chance to come out. Still, at this moment, it doesn't matter. I love myself, and there's no one I want to change places with. Being Maggie O'Leary is just fine. Today, in fact, it feels terrific.

I think of my father and the unconditional love that only a parent can offer. He died two years ago, and I carry a little of him around in me. I was special to him. He never said it, but I just knew. Aside from my crazy love life, I knew that he would be proud of what I had done with my life, and how it had turned out. He always believed in me, and it made me believe in myself.

Now, not only has my career skyrocketed, I've come to know a lot more about myself over the past few months, and it had nothing to do with years of therapy. It's from life lessons. I've grown smarter about health, and am unafraid of writing about that, even if it contradicts a lot of the thinking that originally made me popular.

Okay, so I had done a colossally stupid thing by flying to L.A., imagining that I could escape my problems by getting back into Taylor's arms, but there were worse things I could have done. At least I now knew that movie-star looks might be the starting point in a relationship, but not the basis for one.

The waiter arrives with the salad, a massive pyramid of tangled greens, lightly dressed with a vinaigrette dressing. It was
a brilliant mix of sweet and bitter greens, as crisp and flavorful as any salad I could imagine. Then the chicken: tender scallops with a lemony glaze. Bite by bite, I eat each golden piece. When the dessert menu is placed before me, I eye it, admire it, and then close the leather-bound book. I sign the check, leave a generous tip and walk out into the midafternoon sun. I decide that I'll start a column, and then visit my mother.

I turn back into a child every time I climb the stairs to the brownstone. My memories are drawn back to the warm summer nights when neighbors sat out on their patios on aluminum folding chairs with glasses of tea or iced coffee, and dishes of ice cream.

The women, dressed in snap-front housedresses, would gossip about the neighbors, or local merchants. “Ever since they sold Sal's, it's gone downhill,” Mrs. McAlary would decree as she held out her leg and studied the varicose veins that crisscrossed it like purple ropes. “They give you less manicotti, and now they charge you for the salads.”

I think back to the time the man in the adjoining brownstone died. Mr. Katz. Everyone in the neighborhood, including Sal, came over to Mrs. Katz's house with covered dishes of food. That confused me. Someone had died. Why were they having a party?

I ring the bell and wait. Finally, my mother opens the door and greets me. She's wearing a pink flowered housecoat and matching pink plastic slippers that flap against the back of her callused heels when she walks. She's wearing bright pink lipstick, powder, too. All those times, when I was a child, I remember opening the medicine cabinet and examining my mother's powder like it was some magical beauty dust that only adults were privy to. I liked the smell of it, and the design of the white-and-coral box. It was made by Coty. The puff was caked with pinky beige powder. Rachel. The color sounded like the name of a beautiful girl.

Next to the powder there was a red Maybelline eyebrow pencil—“light”—tweezers, and a deep pink lipstick with a sweet smell. I think it cost about a dollar twenty-nine and came from Woolworth's. I hadn't looked into the medicine cabinet in years, but I was sure that it would look the same, except, maybe, for a new puff.

“Nice surprise,” my mother says. I kiss her and smell the powder on her soft cheek.

“I took the afternoon off.”

“Come in, I just made coffee, and I have some delicious
cookies. There's a lot, I brought home extra for you to take home.”

“It's fine, Ma, I don't need them. Just the coffee.”

“What do you mean? These are our best cookies.”

I'm annoyed already. I walk in and sit at the kitchen table. Nothing ever gets worn or beaten up in my mother's house. Except for a tiny burn on the white Formica table—where I once started to put down a hot pot of soup—nothing was different. I see the familiar plastic bottle of yellow dish detergent on the sink next to a soap pad container that looks like a hollowed-out tomato. I never got the point of that. The dish drainer is white, made by Rubbermaid. How did my mother keep hers clean? Mine inevitably turned yellow.

“So how are things at work?”

“Oh, you know, the same. The column's doing really well. I—”

That makes her laugh. “So now America's happy to be fat?”

“No one's happy about it,” I say, shaking my head at her like she's a small child. “But it's a fact of life, and you can make yourself miserable or not.
That's
the point.”

She just nods and stirs her coffee, adding one sugar, another, then a third. “Oh, if it were just that easy….”

I look back at her. “Did you ever diet, Ma? Did you ever want to get thinner so that you'd look sexier so that more boys would like you?”

She looks up and smiles. “In the eighth grade, I came home from school and crawled into bed. I was bawling. I had a crush on a ninth-grader. Vincent DeMayo. Funny how you remember names a lifetime later. Anyway, I was walking with my friend Linda, and somebody whistled. We both turned around, and Vincent looked at me and yelled, ‘Not
you, tub of lard.' I wanted to die. I went home and all I ate for the next three days was lettuce.”

I smile. “And then?”

“After all that I didn't even lose a whole pound. I was furious.”

“So what did you do?”

“I told Vincent that if he ever said a mean thing to me again, I'd have my uncle, the butcher, cut him in half with his meat cleaver. And you know what? From then on, he was afraid to look at me.”

Maybe we were more alike than I thought.

“Then I met your father.” She's sixteen again, remembering. I'm studying her face as it softens, fascinated. I don't remember ever having this kind of conversation with her before.

“He heard what Vincent said and how I threatened him. He came over one day and said he liked women who stood up for themselves. He asked me to go to the movies with him. He said he respected me for that. My character.”

“Your character? A tenth-grader said that?”

“Well, he really liked my red hair, but he said something about my personality, too.”

I taste a cookie. “Good. Actually, it's not good, it's great.”

“We're the best bakery in the neighborhood, no, in Brooklyn.” She looks at me closely. “So why weren't you at work when I called?”

“Oh, it's a long story.” I look at her and realize that for the first time, in a long time, I want to tell her. Need to. I want comforting words. “I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but here goes.”

“You're pregnant?”

“No, Mother, I'm not pregnant.” I stop biting the corner of my nail. I tell her the whole story about Tex, and then about Taylor.

She doesn't respond. Did she hear me? “Mother, I—”

“You're dizzy, Maggie.” She starts drumming her fingers on the table, her sign that she's deep in thought.

I look at her and purse my lips. “No, I met Taylor when I was out on the coast. He's very handsome, hard to resist. He's a big star. Then I had this blowup with Tex. I needed to get away…one thing led to another…”

She folds her hands in her lap and just sits there, staring off. “So you run from one, go to another, come back… I don't understand the whole thing.” She's holding one hand in the other. “This is the actor from the television show?”

I get up to pour myself some more coffee. “Yeah.”

“Is he Catholic?”

I roll my eyes. I don't believe it. “Zen Buddhist. I don't know what he is. Who cares?”

She stares back at me. “You did the right thing to come back,” she says, shaking her head. “You're too good for him, Maggie. You can't throw yourself away like that.”

“You never said anything like that to me before.” I don't know why, but at this moment even platitudes from my own mother are reassuring.

“You'll get your life together,” she says, smoothing her apron. “You're a smart girl, you always were. For some women it just takes more time.”

She stands up then and starts putting the dishes into the sink. My family never spent time sitting around at the table. “I have an appointment at the lawyer, Maggie. I have to get ready.”

“Why do you have to see the lawyer?”

“I'm closing the business and selling the property.”

I just look at her.

“I'm too tired to manage it anymore.”

“Who's buying it?”

“A group of Koreans. They own all these nail parlors and—”

“Another stupid nail parlor? Mom, my God, we're like…a fixture in the neighborhood. You can't get a loaf of Wheaten bread anywhere in the world that tastes likes ours and—”

“There's nobody to run the business, Maggie. You girls don't want to run a bakery. What am I going to do with it?”

It feels as though someone were forcing me out of my family house. I stare off into the distance. “I remember growing up in that back room. I had a playpen there, right?”

She shakes her head. “Yes.”

“And the back table, that butcher-block table, where we used to eat ham with Velveeta cheese sandwiches for lunch, and cherry scones with milk after school.” I shake my head. “I'll never forget how on the holidays they formed a line outside waiting to pick up their orders. Those Irish whiskey cakes, the soda breads, the Cadbury chocolate cookies. I remember loading the boxes the night before. Everyone was exhausted, but it felt good. It was our family business, we were prospering, and after all the work we would close on Christmas Day and stay home together as a family.”