Prologue

I was born in the middle of dinner.  That’s what my parents say.  They sat down to eat at the kitchen table, my mom had two bites and her water broke.  She said I smelled her lasagna.

When I starting crawling, I began to distinguish the rooms of the house, and I learned that the kitchen was where the food came from.  During the day, when I languished on the floor, using the cupboard knobs for support, or clutching at mom’s pant legs, I could see nothing beyond the shadowy, overhanging lip of the counter.

One day, after a good amount of tugging on my mother’s honey-colored corduroys, she picked me up and set me down on a wondrous landscape.  So many bottles and packets and tubs and jars.  Boiling pots on glowing coils.  Pasta like multi-colored springs in a jar.  The sink and its silver gooseneck that gushed water when touched.  Everything miraculous, alive.  And my mother’s hands gliding over and through all, from one tool to the next, chopping, stirring, raising a spoon to her lips, then down again, reaching into the cupboard for a shake-shake of this, and three twists of that.  She had such pretty hands, her nails sparkling in the light, like red glass rose petals.

At first I had only the paper towel roll within reach and all I could to do with that was pull.  But as I learned words like “stir” and “mix it” and “hot!” and “sharp” my chubby, little fingers were allowed to clutch the massive tools, and she taught me how to wield them.  I was a good helper.  She liked to pinch my baby cheeks to make me laugh but I never dropped my spoon in the mix.

Each time we finished making a meal, my father would appear and we’d eat until we couldn’t eat any more.  I did, anyway.  And I kept learning, every night.  When Mom asked, I could find her spatula in the jar behind me and the garlic press in the drawer between my legs.  My arms could reach farther too.  Sitting on the counter, they went up into the cupboard to get the olive oil.  I was growing into a big girl, my stomach like a round squishy cookie jar.  That’s what Mom called it.

The night before I started kindergarten, my mom and I were going to make a special dinner.  We carried the groceries in from the car, me with one bag, her with four.  They looked heavy as she swung them up onto the counter.  She sighed and we started putting everything away.  Then it was time for me to get up.  She put her hands under my armpits and barely lifted me off the floor, squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe.  Then she dropped me, rattling the glasses in the cupboard.  She looked me hard in the face, reached over and softly pinched my cheek.  Her cheeks were the opposite of mine, they scooped in.

She sighed, shaking her head as she turned to the counter and started to peel the onions.  “I’m sorry baby, you’re just too heavy now.”  So I hovered behind her skirt, catching glimpses of her long, deft fingers when the curtain of her elbow parted from her waist.

I went to get a chair to stand on but when I brought it up to the counter, she told me to put it back.  “Why don’t you go make sure your book bag is all packed, okay?  I can manage with dinner.”  So I dragged the chair back to the table and left her there to work alone.

 The next morning before we left for school, she was pulling at my clothes, trying to stuff bits of me back in.  Pulling up my pants.  Pulling down my shirt.  She wanted me to wear my nice green pants but they were so tight.  “I don’t know what that damn dryer is doing,” she grumbled.  “They didn’t used to fit like this…”  I thought I could wear my elastic top jeans but she said they had a stain.  “It’s all right,” she said.  “Just, can you suck in that cookie jar a little bit?”  I did, and the pants came free, moving up to where she wanted them.  “There, now you look so nice, don’t you?”

In second grade, during a short-lived obsession with Inspector Gadget, I pretended my mother was a mad scientist, and the kitchen her lab.  It was my mission to decipher her recipes, to discover what she put in the food to make it so good.  From the second floor landing, lying on my stomach, I could just see under the kitchen door awning and along the counter where she worked.  I took notes on tiny slips of paper, revising and adding details each time she repeated a dish.  Then I transferred my observations to the Top Secret Recipes book, which I kept behind the wallpaper that was coming loose in my closet.

When the doctor weighed me and said I was “still too much,” my mom started to pack lunches with no cookies.  She stopped asking if I wanted a snack when I got home from school.  I tried to take less than I wanted at dinner each night but always found myself skulking back to the dark kitchen before bed to plunge into the cold leftovers. 

I knew she knew.  I knew she could see the spooned out dents left in her perfectly packed Tupperware tubs.  But my stomach felt so empty.  I couldn’t fall asleep.

After sneaking food all through high school, I left for NYU and found a strange kind of asylum in the dining hall.  Surrounded by the massive selection of overcooked, underseasoned options, eating became more of chore than an illicit pleasure and I ate only what I needed to survive.  After just one semester, I could already see the shrinking effect this had on my body.  I was thrilled to arrive back at the house for winter break in a new pair of jeans, a full size smaller than the ones I’d worn at Thanksgiving.  If Mom noticed, she didn’t let on.

On New Year’s Eve, holed up in my high school shrouded room and miserable that I had nowhere to go, I spied the wallpaper in the corner of my closet, pouching out and betraying the square form behind it.  The notebook was faded and warped.  I thumbed through the carefully scripted sheets of ruled paper, with diagrams and special notes filling the margins.  It was all so careful, so reverent.  I ripped out fistful after fistful and threw it all away.

My new year’s resolutions:

1. Forget how to cook.
2. Never eat good food again.

Chapter 1

Three years out of college, I walked into an overstuffed and overpriced second-hand store in the West Village, eyeing the hipster that slipped in just before me.  I registered the oversized shirt that fell off her shoulder, just-so, and the gold woven belt that pulled it in at her tiny waist.  I had been holding at a size 14 for a while, and in the right outfit, I didn’t completely hate the way I looked, but girls who put themselves together like that made me uncomfortable.

It was two days before my mother’s 50th birthday.  I hadn’t seen her for a year and half.  We were drifting.  Still, it was her birthday.  So I worked my way through the cramped aisle of the store, which wound a loop around an adorned island of shelves, hatboxes and coat stands.  In the back corner, under a moth-eaten moose head with one glass eye, I came upon a stack of mirrors, pictures and painted tin posters leaning against the wall, and there I found a big, sixteen-by-twenty pelican sitting on a pint of Guinness.  My mom was a collector of vintage Guinness advertising.  I had thought, growing up, that it was something she did for my dad, to make him feel more Irish; but when she moved to California with the doctor, she took the collection with her. 

I liked the poster, it was a good image with minimal scratches and dents, but I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything better, so I pulled it out and leaned it against the arm of an elegant, upholstered chair behind me and then continued flipping through the heavy stack.  I needed mail it that night to get it to Mom in time. 

Meanwhile, the slinky little hipster was hovering closer and closer, picking over a rack of long, beaded necklaces next to me.  I looked over, hoping to casually suggest that she was crowding.  We met eyes, she looked down at my ass and then away with eyebrows lofted, as if contenting herself with the fact that she wasn’t too close, I just took up too much space.  She moved on.

I got through the rest of the posters, seeing a few interesting things but nothing else Guinness-related, so I delicately swung the pile back to lean it against the wall and turned to find my poster gone.  I turned a full circle, careful not to bump into anything, looking around me, but I found nothing, then stepped around the island to see Miss Bare-Shoulder pulling out her orange leather wallet to pay for my mom’s gift.

“Wait!” I yelped before I knew what would come next.  She turned her head.  The old man behind the counter looked up. 

“That’s mine,” I said, walking up to the counter, putting my body between the poster and the door.

“Um, I’m sorry,” said the girl, with a shallow pretense of sympathy.  “I found this.”

“No, I found it,” I said, feeling my cheeks getting hot as I pulled at my shirt, my armpits starting to steam.  “I got it out of that stack back there and I put it to one side so I could keep looking.”

“Sorry,” she shrugged, pulling a credit card out of her wallet and holding it out for the man.  “I didn’t know you wanted it.”

“But I do want it.”  My fingers reached out and grabbed the corner.  Her little toy hand came down and grabbed the other edge, trying to pull back, but with one tug, I had it away from her again. 

“This is ridiculous,” she spat, her jaw jutting forward as she snatched up her card and shoved it back in her wallet.  “Fucking take the thing.  I’m not about to wrestle for it.  You look like you’d eat me.”  She pushed through my shoulder and out of the store.

I smiled an apology at the old man, trying to hide the sting.  “Not likely,” I mumbled handing over my card.

“Oh, I think you could,” he winked, swiping the card.

“Excuse me?”

“Wasn’t much to her.”

I couldn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe he would say that to a customer, whatever he might have thought. 

“That’s…  Well, I’m not here to impress you.”

Now he looked confused.  “I’m sorry?”

“Eat her?  You think I would eat her?”

“Eat her?”

“Yeah, that’s what you said right?”

His silver-whiskered brows were knit together.  “I said…  No, oh, I see.  No, didn’t she say you’d probably beat her – like in a fight?”

“Oh.  Sorry, yeah, maybe that’s what it was.”

As I gripped the pen to sign my receipt, now fully sweating with spent adrenaline, it struck me that a hundred and thirteen dollars and a fight with a hipster was a little more than my mother was worth.

Reprinted courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.