She was so angry.
She grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me up against the wall, in the foyer just inside our front door. I’d just come in. The back of my head banged against the wall with its green-gold wallpaper textured to look like bamboo. Two balsa-wood masks swung on the nails that moored them. My mother’s face was inches from mine, her thumbnails digging half-moons into my skin through the thin fabric of my T-shirt.
I don’t know which T-shirt. Only that because this was happening in Los Angeles, in summer, it had to be a T-shirt. I had worn it to go and see my friend Laurel, who lived across the street. Laurel was having company, other company, her other best friend from the other town where her family lived before moving to L.A.—so when I heard their car pull up after returning from the airport, I rushed over and met this Tamara, already eleven, with her wavy blond bangs, under the false-orchid tree that shed purple blossoms shaped like sailboats.
But after half an hour or so I caught them exchanging looks that meant Get her out of here!
The masks went clack-clack on the wall. My mother drew closer as if we were going to kiss, which of course we were not. She sniffed—making a sharp sound like scraping cement.
What did you eat?
Digging her sandaled heel into the hardwood floor. What did you eat?
Nothing. I said it way back in my throat, like a ventriloquist, so that as little air as possible escaped my mouth. But sniff sniff—pepper. Nitrites. Smoke and vinegar.
She always said liars are worse than thieves. She said it then.
Her thumbnails, ow.
Her eyes raced down my face, my front, as if it were made of clear glass and she could see inside. She knew.
Hot dog.
It was always worst when she growled like that. Like God. She pronounced it her own way: doh-wug.
Over at Laurel’s, there had been this box of hot dogs her family had bought at Der Wienerschnitzel on the way home from the airport, where they picked up Tamara. They were like that, picking up fast food, throwing banana-split parties, ordering pizzas on whims. And her mother had lifted plump cylinders out to all of us: Who wants a mustard dog? Who wants a kraut dog? And I should have said no thanks as usual. I should have said I have to go. But that would have meant going. Leaving Laurel here to play Barbies with Tamara. And I was not going to go until they forced me out. Which they did, like ten minutes later, but not before that mustard dog.
Heat rose in waves off Mom’s face.
My dad passed us en route to the kitchen, carrying a wrench: What’s going on?
She poked the soft spots right above my collarbone for emphasis. She went. Across the street. And ate a hot dog.
But doh-wug made it sound nastier, like something that waggles and gleams.
She had this rule, and it was: never eat at other people’s houses. No matter what they said. No matter what they did. No matter what they offered, decline. Either tell them the truth—Sorry, not allowed—or depending on who they were, come up with a lie. I have a stomachache. I’m allergic to frosting. I’m not hungry, though this last one was difficult because I was hungry all the time. My mother served three meals a day, real meals with meat, but between them I was racked with a wild, aching hunger, though Mom said You’re not hungry, you’re just bored.
No, I’m hungry.
I know you. You’re bored.
At home she served no snacks. Nor could I sneak them from the fridge—she could hear footsteps on the kitchen lino from the far end of the house, even with Merv Griffin on TV interviewing psychic mediums and acrobats. She would hear fingers riffling through the sock drawer where my father hoarded candy: giant Hershey bars, boxes of Dots, pound bags of chocolate Santas or marshmallow peanuts that he was allowed to eat but I was not.
Anyway, this rule. She said I shouldn’t eat what others offered because if I did, they would think I was starving, that I wasn’t being fed enough at home. If I ate what they gave me they would have a chance to observe my manners and remark on them. If I ate what they gave me they would laugh behind my back—after I left, they would point at my empty plate or soiled napkin and snicker to one another: What a hog!
And most of all, the main thing was that eating other people’s food would make me fat.
Mom was watching my weight. I was thin in a flat, unremarkable way, but she watched me in my school clothes and play clothes, in my swimsuits and the giant mirrors at the mall. She checked on me in the bathtub on the pretense of asking whether or not I had a towel.
She watched, because life is so cruel. She watched, because my three best friends were overweight and what if I became like them? Like proselytizers, how could they resist? Either in innocence, because they loved their fudge and Cheez-Its and wanted to share this joy—or in contrivance, loathing their own weight and seeing my flat bottom as a mockery. A taunt. They thrust corn-chip bags at me like maracas, cha-cha-cha. They snatched boxes of Jell-O off the shelf, saying Let’s suck the powder straight out of the box with straws.
She knew.
Mom was once fat herself, as a big-city schoolgirl whom the other kids called Four-by-Four and Blubberjug and Tub. She knew. Back in those days—see her in pictures, seersucker and taffeta stretched tight as sausage casings, scowling at the lens as if its glass could laugh.
Not that she was still big or anything. A life-threatening illness at age thirty sheared her down to a size ten and there she stayed. But by God she must watch me. Anything might inflate me at any moment, one French fry or jellybean too many. For those hours when she was not there to see: the rule.
My friends scoffed at the rule. Their parents scoffed. Honey, that’s silly! My friend Karen’s mom was Japanese. She called my mom and put on a fake accent, saying Plea-zu can she su-tay heah for lunch. Ho-su-pitality is the Jah-panese way. No luck. Another day, my friend Michelle’s dad—he was drunk—called my mom demanding that she let me share his daughter’s Ritz crackers. So you’re kosher, so what? he boomed. It’s not like they’re pork rinds.
No, but they were crackers, and crackers were the worst food of all. Crackers, cookies, bread, cake. I mean, all food was treacherous just because it was edible, but my mother had special theories about starches being the most treacherous of all. Eating a hot dog across the street was bad enough—and she was in a redcheeked rage from it, though really it was all from love—but she would not have jammed her thumbnails into my shirt if it had been just a frankfurter without a bun. I almost could have talked my way out of it, said it was a new Der Wienerschnitzel product, a special sales promotion: the new bunless low-calorie dog. I should have said so outright, but by the time I thought it up, it was too late, would have been obviously a lie, because buns made so much difference that if there wasn’t one, then by God that’s the first thing you would mention. She sometimes forgave me, hours later, for eating fried chicken. Fish sticks. Even ice cream. But not ice cream in cones. Never chicken with biscuits. My mother was an Atkins dieter before there was an Atkins diet, back when Dr. Robert Atkins was a plain old cardiologist who recommended vitamins. She said that even sugar was better than starch because sugar was a source of quick energy, which bodies could burn off if they played hard. Rolls, on the other hand, or spaghetti, were sneaky. They turned into glue when you chewed them and they slid inside you and adhered. Layer on layer—stuck.
Bread was never served with meals at our house, and at restaurants we shunned the rolls or Saltines that came free: we ate huge quantities of meat and salad, even bowls of ice cream for dessert, even with slabs of Dream Whip. We had cereal or bagels now and then for breakfast, but a nimbus of sin and foreboding hung over them. Someday you’ll pay for this! In my school lunches I got beef sticks, or hot soup in Thermoses, and sometimes sandwiches but on a special thin brown “dietetic” bread. I straddled the bench eating my sandwich, its dietetic bread framing six slices of bologna, piled half an inch high, as Laurel laughed, eating a Ding Dong, white cream spurting through the gap between her teeth.
When I went away to college in another town, my residence card gave me access to a dining commons three times a day, where buffet meals were served. Mom was worried, and rightly so. But I did not rebel. Tray after tray of fresh bread and lasagna and German chocolate cake lined the stainless-steel rack that gleamed into the distance like a runway. Other freshmen grew fat. I forked lettuce into my mouth, thick with Thousand Island dressing, nibbled bunless patties, and poured so much Sweet’n Low into iced tea that it tasted of deodorant, or zinc.
After two years in the dorm, I shared an apartment with friends. I worked at a frozen-yogurt shop, so my junior and senior years were fueled almost entirely on frozen yogurt—plain or with cashews. One night at the frozen-yogurt shop I met a classics major with hair the color of pennies. I gave him a free cone, not that night, of course, but the next, and the next and the next.
We were in Europe together after graduation, drifting hand in hand for months through Viking theme parks and wallpaper museums and chapels constructed of human bones. Of course, I was still eating my same way, ordering steaks and half-chickens and saucissons, shunning the baskets of bread, rolls, and pastries that came with meals and gleamed in bakeshop windows. Brioches and croissants. German seeded spirals served with tiny tubs of liverwurst. Golden Austrian crowns awaiting jam. Dark Dutch gingerbread, oil-jeweled Spanish churros shaped like wands: under the dry blue sky he dipped his in hot chocolate, pudding-thick. I’m not hungry, I said. Ten thousand bakeries where he chose tarts and loaves and puffs: and then one day…
I still wonder what it was about that day. It was not a birthday or a holiday, just a plain Wednesday or Sunday. We were in Delphi, that Greek hill-city where ancient sibyls used to read the future in smoke that rose up swirling between their feet from cracks in the soil. That midmorning he took his time in the bakery, eyeing its racks of honey-soaked baklava and syrupy shredded-wheat nests cradling nuts. But no. Handing the clerk his few coins, he chose two raisin rolls. Plain. Round. The slick brown of saddles.
Try one, he said when we were outside, on a bench in the clattery street with its view of the slopes whose pine and juniper mixed with the traffic perfume. He held it out to me on his freckled hand.
Ha ha, I said, no.
Try it, he said, biting the other one.
What was it? The black coffee we’d been drinking all morning from tiny cups? The proximity of sibyls? The fact that I was farther from home than ever before? Almost without thinking—almost but not quite: I felt a flash, a reconnaissance, as you feel at reunions—I took the roll and ate it. Just—pulled off one tuft after another and put them into my mouth till it was finished. That stretchy softness, warm to the teeth, black fruit off mountain vines popping like music.
More than twenty years have passed since that roll. I kept the guy, but otherwise I’ve never looked back. After that trip I found out that I’ve always been hypoglycemic. My blood cannot produce enough of its own sugar, and aches for it. This is why I’ve always gotten so hungry between meals, that pounding demented hunger. My blood screams please please please mainline complex carbohydrates, with their linked sugar molecules like strings of beads regulating the glucose, drop by drop, to calm me. Moron, give me that, it says—it said for all those years, but I cursed it. All those uneaten Cheez-Its spilled on the ground, wasted bliss. But no longer.
I crave starch. I eat it. Pastries, French fries, and bread produce a kind of euphoria, a floaty sparkly electrical charge. I eat sponge cake. Noodles. Toast.
And the plainer the better, those thick butterless slices, barely toasted, those noodles tossed only with cottage cheese. I am like an alcoholic drinking straight shots. My copper-haired guy laughs at my enthusiasm. I like these foods more than he ever did, in the same way that converts are the most devout daveners in the shul.
He likes spicy dishes. Salty dishes, soupy dishes, crunchy dishes. He likes mixed dishes in which the starch is dotted or even overwhelmed with other items. When we are eating together sometimes we go my way but sometimes we have to go his.
Sometimes I have the whole house to myself. When he is not looking, when he is not awake or is off playing chess and cannot laugh at me, it is plainest of all: white on white and nearly dry, without a trace of spice. He cannot laugh when I toss noodles with cottage cheese. My mother lives five hundred miles away and cannot watch me eat. When we see each other, she praises me for staying almost the same weight as when I was in high school. I think she might even take credit for that. She has watched me polish off a pot of white rice and sat squinting, as you might at a magic trick. Tossing together pale ingredients now in the empty house—the radiant yield of wheatfield and cornfield and rice paddy and potato patch—I mutter: I’m making up for lost time! If I do it fast enough, the copper-haired guy who dreams of vindaloo and chipotle and kimchee will not see. He cannot laugh as he likes to do, pitying my food for being plain. He cannot say it is a kind of crime: a waste, chicanery, as some say about those white-on-white paintings by Mark Rothko.
White-on-White Lunch for When No One Is Looking
1 12-ounce package egg noodles
2 cups cottage cheese
Salt and/or pepper, to taste (optional)
Cook noodles in boiling water as directed on package. Drain in colander. When dry, toss with cottage cheese. Add seasonings if you like, though I never do. It is possible to dress this lunch up by adding canned spinach and garlic, chopped fine. But that would distract from the noodles.