The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

a l s o b y e l i z a b e t h b e r g
Dream When You’re Feeling Blue

The Handmaid and the Carpenter

We Are All Welcome Here

The Year of Pleasures

The Art of Mending

Say When

True to Form

Ordinary Life: Stories

Never Change

Open House

Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True
Until the Real Thing Comes Along

What We Keep

Joy School

The Pull of the Moon

Range of Motion

Talk Before Sleep

Durable Goods

Family Traditions

the day i ate

whatever i wanted

r a n d o m h o u s e

N e w Yo r k

elizabeth

berg

The Day I Ate

Whatever I Wanted

And Other Small Acts

of Liberation

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Elizabeth Berg

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The following stories were previously published: “The Only One of Millions Just Like Him” appeared in
Bark
and “The Party” appeared in
Ploughshares.

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Berg, Elizabeth.

The day I ate whatever I wanted: and other small acts of liberation / Elizabeth Berg.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-718-1

1. United States—Social life and customs—21st century—Fiction.

2. Women—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.E6996D39 2008

813'.54—dc22 2007034704

www.atrandom.com

Book design by Casey Hampton

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To Matthew Sumner Krintzman

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Katelyn Rose Krintzman

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contents

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

3

Returns and Exchanges

14

The Party

29

Over the Hill and into the Woods

35

Full Count

54

Rain

74

The Day I Ate Nothing I Even Remotely Wanted

97

Mrs. Ethel Menafee and Mrs. Birdie Stoltz

104

Double Diet

128

The Only One of Millions Just Like Him

146

Truth or Dare

160

How to Make an Apple Pie

201

Sin City

213

Acknowledgments

243

the day i ate

whatever i wanted

the day i ate

whatever i wanted

Ibegan at Dunkin’ Donuts. I hadn’t gone there since I started Weight Watchers a year ago because I had to lose weight; my doctor
made
me go. I could have switched doctors, but who needs it with all the forms you have to fill out if you switch. You just wish there were a central head-quarters with all your information that you write out once so that everyone who needs anything could tap into it.

Weight Watchers is a good organization, I mean it does actually work if you do the program and they try really hard to make you like you, which, as you may know, is a problem a lot of fat people have, they have low self-esteem. Skinny people look at fat people with disgust and have visions of them stretched out on fuchsia-colored silk sofas snarfing down Cool Ranch Doritos and Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, but it isn’t like that. What it is, is eating 4

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d and eating with your shoulders hunched and your head down to scratch that itch that won’t get scratched, and you have so much shame when you gobble things down you hardly even taste them. You start with
I want
and you end with
I want,
only now you have even more weight added to what is already too much and don’t think we don’t know it all, all, all the time.

But anyway, I went to my Weight Watchers meeting one day, and in addition to the usual annoying
emaciated
people who have no
business
there, there were two new members who absolutely blew my mind. Both of them on this same day. One was an old woman on oxygen with a walker taking about a thousand hours to get to the scales, and she was not to my eye fat at all. The other was a blind woman. Here is my question: When that blind woman looks into her mirror, what does she see? And anyway, she, too, had no visible blubber. I mean, I just walked out. I said to myself, No. Today, on account of those two women, on
behalf
of those two women, I am going to eat anything I want from now until midnight. And I drove right over to Dunkin’ Donuts. You may be thinking, Why did she go to Dunkin’ Donuts if she could have anything she wanted?

Why didn’t she go to Cinnabon? Well, because I actually like Dunkin’ Donuts way more than Cinnabon. Cinnabon is just a whore, you know, no subtlety. I like almost all the donuts at Dunkin’ Donuts and I really like the coffee though I usually just get regular coffee, milk, no sugar.

But today I got coffee, heavy cream. “Anything else?” the counter person asked. She was Hispanic, about thirty years old, beautiful long black hair tied back in a ponytail under her Dunkin’ Donuts hat and a really big caboose, what can you do, you’d have to be a weird person not to gain a lot of weight if you worked at D.D. Once when I was on a road
T h e D a y I A t e W h a t e v e r I Wa n t e d
5

trip I stopped at this great country kitchen place and every single person who worked there was really fat, I mean really fat. With good skin. And it was a happy place; everybody seemed to get along really well, they were just smiling, holding their little pads and pencils and I had one of those why don’t I move here moments, like where I saw myself sitting in a chair by a window in my little yellow house, lilac trees outside and nothing hurting inside. Like, content at last, which I always think I’ll be if I move, but which I know is a wrong assumption even though a lot of us have it, just ask any real estate agent. But anyway, the counter woman (her name tag said SIGRID, but I think maybe she just borrowed that name tag, it was put on with no care at all, for one thing, just hanging there perpendic-ularly).
Anyway,
Sigrid’s fat looked good, truly, every now and then you see a person who wears fat well, it is that tight fat and just really looks kind of delicious and also their attitude is just great, like in your face:
I’m fat, so fucking what, get over your sanctimonious self.
It’s usually the tight fat people who are like that, maybe it’s a gene. Anyway, after Sigrid said, “Anything else?” I said, “Oh yes, I want some donuts.” I cannot tell you how swell that felt.

“How many donuts?” Sigrid asked and I said I didn’t know, I would know when the little voice stopped. “Pardon?” she said, and I said, “Just get a big box, please, but maybe we won’t quite fill it.” So she got out a big Dunkin’

Donuts box and I just started
salivating,
like that experiment dog. Sigrid grabbed one of those tissue squares that I think we all take pleasure in using, and she raised her eyebrows and I said, “Okay. A bow tie, a chocolate-frosted cake, a Key lime, a powdered cake, a Boston Kreme, a lemon bark, a maple-frosted, a coffee roll, a maple-frosted coffee roll, a cranberry muffin, a bagel and cream cheese 6

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d and butter, too, on the bagel, and a plain Dunkin’ donut.”

And then before she tallied it up I handed her a fifty and said just keep the change and walked out. My back was feeling kind of hypervisible, like I was walking away really cool from a crime scene where I’d been the criminal.

My heart was racing and my mood level had shot way, way up.

I got in my car and I opened the coffee and had a deep whiff and a taste. Actually, I guess I have begun to prefer milk in my coffee because the cream tasted
whoa.
Next I opened the lid on the box and had a good whiff of the donuts. And then I looked around and there was no one so I ran my tongue along every single surface of every single donut. Man. It was sexual in a way, but more yeasty and better. Then I sucked the filling out of the Boston Kreme mixed with a little chocolate frosting. I dipped the powdered cake in the coffee and had one bite; ditto the chocolate-frosted. I went on in this manner until I would say about a third of the donuts were gone. And then I am sorry to say I threw the rest away. I would like to say I ate tidily and cut off where bite marks were and gave the rest to a homeless person along with a couple of finskis, but I did not. I threw them in the garbage, where maybe later they were found by a homeless person anyway or at least by pi-geons, who, depending on where they live, can actually have it pretty good. Though sudden violent death is always a problem for them. But probably they have no attachments, which helps.

I was pretty full, so I went for a walk in a park to make room for lunch. It was a nice day and there were joggers, with their determined, miserable faces, and lovers lying in the grass thinking it would last forever. There were lots of dogs and one was a bulldog puppy, which, please, has cor-

T h e D a y I A t e W h a t e v e r I Wa n t e d
7

nered the market on cuteness. The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do—even when they smile, it’s like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable, too, but at least they
look
jolly even though it’s really mostly them apologizing, like, “Sorry, sorry, sorry I’m taking up so much room,” “Sorry I’m offending your idea of bodily aes-thetics,” “Sorry I’m clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes.” And spilling over airline seats, which, come on, even for skinny people those seats are ridiculous. Metal girdles.

Lunch was a problem, like do I sit down or continue to fast-food it. Because I really do appreciate good food, but fast food is what I always
want.
Drive past a White Castle?

See myself opening one of the little burgers with the onions all square. Go past KFC? See the big bucket, lift off the lid, see the one corner of one breast just loaded with coating that you pull off and pop into your mouth.

Wendy’s? Regular with cheese, just a plain regular with cheese and it is
good.
The buns are still good at Wendy’s, they’re not those weary things other places give you that are like bread out of an old person’s bread box who never throws anything away and it was cheap bread and not good in the first place. Generic.

Hot dogs? Well. I live in Chicago, where we know what hot dogs
are
and how they should be
served.
I know someone who used to fly from Boston to San Francisco once a month on business and she always stopped in Chicago so she could get a red hot. She said she told people she needed a walk but really she needed a red hot. She ate them in the first-class cabin and all the people used to get pissed off at her. She said they got pissed off because the onions stunk the place up, but I think they got pissed off because they 8

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d didn’t have the foresight to bring a red hot on board themselves. A flight attendant can put all the French words in the world after “beef ” and it still tastes like airline food, which tastes like jet fuel smells.

They don’t have red hots in the airport all over the place like they used to. If you come to O’Hare and you have a bit of a layover, get in a cab and tell them Superdawg at Milwaukee and Nagle, it’s only about ten minutes away. Get the regular hot dog, but you might also want to try the Whoopercheesie or Whoopskidawg. There is only one Superdawg and it was started by a guy and his wife, they fell in love in high school and now they’re probably in their eighties. You can see her working the booth, she sits there in her black nylon windbreaker and you shout your order into the little metal box by where you park. Everybody gets their own speaker and their own menu, which has humorous descriptions of the food.

Portillo’s hot dogs are also good, and their tamales, oh my. You eat them with a plastic spoon, which adds to the flavor, as does the light orange grease stain on the wrapper.