I smiled.
“I could offer you a banana,” he said.
Now I laughed. “I’m fine.”
He closed the refrigerator door and looked at it as though it were a relative he was awfully fond of. “Let’s go,” he said.
He took nothing with him but his beat-up wallet. He did not lock his door. He did not look back, not before he got in the car, not after. I pulled slowly away, then, after the house was no longer in view, picked up speed.
We didn’t talk much on the way to the hospital. I was thinking of what I’d tell Dennis about this day, what about it belonged to him and what about it belonged to me and what about it belonged to Michael, and I decided it all belonged to Michael.
At the last tollbooth before we got off the turnpike, I reached in my cup holder for two quarters to pay the fifty-cent charge. Michael said, “You know, I’ve always found that one quarter works just as well.” I tried it; I put in one quarter, and the gate lifted.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I’ve always meant to tell you that. I have no idea why it took me so long.”
I said nothing. To acknowledge all that was in that remark would be to put a fist through the dam. I drove the short distance to the hospital and pulled into a parking place near the entrance. I cut the engine and touched Michael’s arm, gently called his name. He started—apparently he’d fallen asleep—and looked out the window. “Big place,” he said. Then he said, “Okay. I’ll be wanting to go in alone.” He sighed, and pointed at me. “You,” he said.
I pointed back at him. “You.”
On the way home, a light rain fell. It wasn’t enough to require using the wipers. But some drops gathered along the side of windshield, and when I came to a stop sign I noticed how they captured light and refracted it, how a whole spectrum of possibility was contained within a single drop of water.
I visited Michael a few more times, but he was often sleeping, and then he became difficult or impossible to understand. He died the night after some friends had taken him outside briefly on a gurney to see the few flowers that grew on the grounds, and to watch for birds, which never came.
THE DAY I ATE NOTHING I EVEN REMOTELY WANTED
Those Weight Watchers meetings are murder. There’s always a bunch of brownnosers who get little presents and applause for the pounds they lost. Sometimes a little whoop, too, there’s this one woman at my meetings who whoops for people. And the leader always makes this announcement at the end of the meeting about how many pounds were lost this week by our whole group. I sit in the back staring at my lap because week after week I mostly lose nothing. Well, one time I lost three pounds. I’d had the flu, and the whole time I was embracing the toilet, a part of me was saying, “Yes!” Next meeting, two and a half pounds had come right back on, saying, “Hey there, Bubbles, did you miss me?”
Still, the meetings do work for getting me motivated over and over again. They make me feel like when I was a little girl and went to confession every week. All the way home, I used to walk so slow and tight to keep my soul spotless, but as soon as I came in the door, there was my brother. Same thing with the meetings: each time, I vow it’s going to be different this week, and then on the way home I see a Krispy Kreme, no line. Or, you know, my kitchen.
“It’s okay,” my leader always tells me. “We all slip up once in a while. You come to the meetings every week; that’s a great start!! Just try to eat less, now.” Her eyes are kind; her belt is cinched a bit too tight, but, hey, let her take credit where credit is due. One thing about those leaders: I always wonder about their personal lives. I mean, are they always like this? If so, do their co-workers at their real jobs want to slug them? Sometimes I wonder so hard about their personal lives it keeps me from paying attention to the meeting, which always has a little allegory of some kind, some story you’re listening to, wondering what does that have to do with anything, and then whump! A diet lesson has been delivered. I feel kind of sorry for my leader. She tries so hard. So yesterday, just for her, I tried to eat right.
I began breakfast with coffee and skim milk. Do you know what drinking coffee with skim milk is like? It’s like asking for a dress and being handed a slip. Also I had toast, which was equally disgusting because it was toast made the new way, using diet bread, a.k.a. cardboard. Here is my recipe for toast made the old way: (1) Go to the bakery and buy a loaf of freshly baked white bread. (2) Take two slices from the middle of the loaf and toast them to just light brown. (3) Lay the toast out on a beautifully patterned antique china plate that has a rim of gold and must be washed by hand, but it’s worth it. (4) Saturate the toast with a rounded tablespoon of Plugrá butter (European-style, higher fat content), which has been melted in an old cast-iron skillet that your grandma gave you that never was and is not now all that clean. Just to be clear, that would be a rounded tablespoon of butter on each piece of toast. All the way to the corners and then some. (5) Cut the toast on the diagonal into four lovely pieces. (6) Dunk in hot chocolate you’ve made with Dutch-processed cocoa and cream, and over which you’ve sprinkled fifty or sixty little mini-marshmallows, very fresh and boingy ones. (7) Eat, while dialing the number for the Buddha. When he answers, say, “You want contentment? I’ll show you contentment!” So that is toast, made the old way.
When you make toast the new way, you spray it with some chemical stuff that comes in a cheerful can and is colored yellow and that is supposed to make you think it tastes like butter, but it does not, it tastes like chemicals and it reminds you of jaundice.
Along with the toast, I had some fruit that I bought in a plastic container at a fancy health food store whose nickname is Whole Paycheck, because I wanted a mix of fruit and didn’t want to spend a month’s rent on an assortment of whole melons and whole baskets of berries. So I bought this mix that looked very appealing, the cute little blueberries and raspberries mixed with other things like cantaloupe and honeydew (which, wait, what does “honeydew” mean?), but guess what? The fruit had no taste. Zero. It was all texture, no taste. And the texture was slimy. And forget bringing the fruit back to the store. Because they are trained to make you feel bad. They say, Sure, we’ll give you a store credit, but look at their nostrils: flared.
Here is a quiz: What does the dieting woman have for lunch? Right! Salad! And what kind of dressing? Right again! Almost none!
It is said you can get used to salad with no dressing. Well then, why call it a salad? Why not call it grazing? I will admit that sometimes a strip of red pepper can taste good. But that’s usually because you’ve added salt, which helps just about everything, even chocolate, as they have finally discovered. But when you’re dieting, what must you cut down on, in addition to everything else? Which reminds me: Have you tried air-popped popcorn? No butter, no oil, no salt? I believe it began as a practical joke, but then the diet people heard about it.
Okay, so I had salad with vinegar and an atom of oil. So boring. I had to make up a fantasy to get through it. Which was that I had to eat really fast because I was on my way to an all-expense-paid trip to Japan, where I have been wanting to go lately, so who cared what I was eating, it was just fuel (something else dieters are encouraged to think, that eating is just fuel rather than, oh, a reason to get up in the morning). I had to hurry and eat to catch the plane, where I had a first-class seat. But then my fantasy led to dangerous waters, like, hmmmm, first class, don’t they serve freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on those flights? I wanted to make some low-cal, low-fat coconut custard after that, which really is actually not too bad tasting except you feel like you’re in an old folks’ home when you eat it. But I didn’t make the custard because what usually happens is I eat all of it, not just one serving, and I was not going to cheat. One day at a time, as the AA people so wisely tell themselves every day. I modify this to: one meal at a time. So instead of coconut custard, I had an apple, which, like most apples these days because they’re stored for two hundred years, tasted like mush. “Ummmmm!” said I, to fake mys
elf out. So appley, so not at all in need of baking with butter and sugar and cinnamon in a cunning little crust.
Oh, the hours before dinner. Made worse by the exercise obligation hovering over me. “Get moving,” said this one pamphlet I got at Weight Watchers. That really gets my dander up. Get moving! Like all I do is lie around. No. I do exercise.
My exercise plan, by Melody Peterson: Every day, take a walk unless you are too tired or it’s cold out. Do not pass grocery stores. Or bakeries. Or restaurants. Basically, walk in the woods and worry that someone will kill you for recreational sport before you’ve even come close to your target weight. You might try “Oh, Mr. Murderer, please don’t kill me, I have only fifteen pounds to go.” It might work. Because he has his own troubles, obviously, and he might relate.
The afternoon passed, the clock finally said four-thirty, and I could think about cooking dinner. I had to make something I didn’t like so as not to eat too much. What? Liver? No, I extremely don’t like liver, plus it can’t be good for you if its role is to filter out toxins, can it? I never got that. Why would you ever eat liver once you’ve seen and touched it? My mom used to make liver and onions, which I have to tell you made me feel like committing suicide. I would walk in the door after coming home from high school, with all its troubles of where to sit in the cafeteria and pimples and physical education teachers, and say, “What’s for dinner?” and my mom would say, “Liver and onions!” all cheerful like Avon calling, and I would just deflate like a cheap balloon.
For dinner, I decided on plain chicken, not even oven-roasted, which just carries that buttery connotation plus when you roast a whole chicken you get crispy skin, which no one can resist except New York women. I think the French women do eat it. But their secret is they eat a little tiny bit of it and then a little tiny bit of chocolate and a lot of wine and they go off and have affairs, which of course burns off all the fat.
Crispy chicken skin being the worst for you, it tastes the best. It is just diabolical, how this is all set up, that the best-tasting things are the worst for you. Isn’t it hard enough here? I hear all the time that once I make the change and get used to eating right, an orange will taste like dessert. “It really will!” they say. To which I silently respond, “Are you talking to me?”
This is a true story. One time I met a chef from a really fancy restaurant, a really expensive one, too. And I asked her what her favorite food was. You know what she said? “Pork rinds. But homemade ones, which are greasier.” Which just goes to prove all kinds of points.
So. A plain baked chicken breast, I thought, maybe a little barbecue sauce, even though barbecue sauce makes me think of baked potatoes, loaded, which is the natural accompaniment, the Mrs. to the Mr. of baked chicken. No. No loaded potato! A plain baked potato, one half, with that damn spray again. Yellow spray. Maybe it doubles as insect repellent, it certainly could, a mosquito would hold up its hand(s), coughing, and say, in its high little whine, “Okay, okay, I surrender, jeez, what is that?”
For my vegetable, I would have broccoli, all the broccoli I could eat. Here is my recipe for broccoli: Cook it any way you want, it doesn’t matter, it will never taste really good without hollandaise sauce. Chew it fast with your nose plugged. Done. I did squeeze some lemon on the broccoli, which kind of helped. So I squeezed on some more. Quite a bit more. Basically, my vegetable was green lemonade.
So that was dinner. Time, after I was finished? Five-seventeen. Now what, now what, I was thinking. I can’t go to bed yet. I went to a double feature at the local theater, two movies I really didn’t care that much about, so I made a game of how many times does someone in the movie wear red? Not often, it turns out, not counting lipstick. I had a big Diet Coke (which I believe kills lab rats) in there with me, and every time someone in the movie ate, I drank. My treat. My “popcorn” and “Junior mints.” Then I came home and took some NyQuil and went to sleep. And now look. I ought to change the name of this story. Because that NyQuil? It was good.
MRS. ETHEL MENAFEE AND MRS. BIRDIE STOLTZ
“Seasoned pepper steak over rice,” Birdie says. “And Oriental-blend vegetables.”
“What’s that mean?” Ethel asks.
“What’s what mean?”
“Oriental-blend vegetables. What was Oriental about them?”
“Oh. Well, I haven’t an idea in the world.”
“Were there snow peas in there or something? Water chestnuts? Bok choy? Daikon?”
“No. Just peas and carrots. And stop showing off.”
“I’m not showing off! But then…was there at least soy sauce over them?”
“Soy sauce? Hold on.” A moment, and then Birdie comes back to the phone. “No. No soy sauce. No butter. No white sauce. No hollandaise. Nothing but peas and carrots, and the peas are all wrinkled.” Her voice is fainter now; she’s not speaking into the mouthpiece.
“Birdie, dear, hold the phone up to your mouth.”
“I am.”
“Well, closer.”
“I am.”
Ethel turns her head away from the phone to sigh. Birdie Stoltz. Stubborn as the day is long. It’s a wonder they’ve been friends for over fifty years. “Do you need me to bring anything today?”
“No.”
“Think first, Birdie. You might need me to bring something.”
“I don’t need a thing.” She sniffs, punctuating herself.
“All right, then. I’ll see you at one.” Ethel hangs up the phone and stares out the window. Her kitchen curtains need washing and starching. They hang limply inclined toward each other, loose in their tiebacks. They look like matching beggar girls, each asking the other for a crumb to put in her basket.
Ethel wishes that Birdie would just once request something. Bed socks. A bar of rose-scented soap. A TV Guide or a Reader’s Digest. French fries from McDonald’s, a box of Good & Plenty. Anything to show that she still has an interest in something. She needs to show an interest in something, or this time she won’t come home, Ethel just knows it. And then what. Then it will be Ethel’s turn to wait for the Great Inevitable all by herself.
Ethel considers bringing Birdie something anyway but then decides against it. Too many times she has handed her friend a package, saying, “Surprise!” or “This is for you because I love you” or “Now, don’t get all excited, really, this is nothing,” only to be met by the flat, nearly accusatory expression on her friend’s face. Birdie doesn’t like to get gifts when she’s in the hospital. As near as Ethel can tell, it’s because they remind Birdie of where she is and of other things she prefers not to think about. Gifts make her think people feel sorry for her. And she will not be felt sorry for. Birdie spends most of her time in the hospital staring straight ahead, waiting for the doctor to tell her she can go home. If anyone calls her Birdie, she says emphatically, “My name is Mrs. Stoltz.”
It’s Birdie’s chronic lymphatic leukemia that has her in the hospital again. She’s done well for a long time, but now things are starting to act up. She’s getting some kind of experimental immune system therapy. If it works, she’ll get another reprieve. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t. Birdie tightened her mouth when she told Ethel that last part, then took in a breath and looked pointedly away. She had the air of someone who had just been grossly insulted, and Ethel supposed she had been.
Ethel takes her curtains down and shakes them out. Maybe they’re not that bad; when she looks at them now, they don’t seem that bad. She hangs them back up and fluffs them out a little. There. Better, if only by virtue of having had someone notice them. “Things have feelings, too!” Ethel used to say, as a little girl; and she still believes it, actually. Why not. Stranger things have been discovered. Plants and their feelings. Dogs and their emotions. The health benefits of dark chocolate—that was a good one. As opposed to Pluto being stripped of its planetary status, that was deeply disturbing. Though not of course to Pluto, which simply continued to orbit, oblivious of its status, out there until it wasn’t. Simple.
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br /> Ethel checks her watch. She’ll go and run some errands: the bank, the drugstore, a turkey sandwich at Subway, and then she’ll go to the hospital. Nothing like having a friend immobilized to make you appreciate your own freedom. She has time to go to the library, too, and she has to quash the immediate impulse to find something for Birdie there, surely her friend couldn’t refuse a library book—it was free, it was returnable. But Birdie would refuse it. She would say thank you but she really didn’t feel like reading. And anyway, maybe a library book didn’t belong in a hospital, where it could get all full of germs. It wouldn’t be polite to bring a library book there. Think of the next person who checked it out, catching something terrible.
Ethel wipes off her kitchen counter, straightens the rag rug in front of the sink, centers the fruit bowl on the little round table. “See you later,” she tells her kitchen.
Ethel bought her house ten years ago, six months after her husband died. It’s on a block lined by tall trees, whose tops meet in the middle of the street like crossed swords at a military wedding. Her place is a little bungalow, Chicago yellow brick, the smallest property on the block, but truly the loveliest, Ethel thinks. She got it for a song, because it had the original bathroom and kitchen, which Ethel preferred. It has a sweet front porch outfitted with a swing, a mature garden out back, small but lush, and art glass high at the tops of the windows that makes for churchlike spills of color on her oak floors in the late afternoon. The closets are small, but what does she need with huge closets? And the closets have glass doorknobs, which she loves. As a girl, she used to pretend the glass doorknobs in her parents’ house were diamonds, and they all belonged to her. Her kitchen sink, too, is similar to the one she grew up with, and she likes to wash her dishes there, all her flowered china that she now uses instead of saving. She splurges on Williams-Sonoma dishwashing soap for her dishes. Birdie does, too. Birdie said once she felt so thrilled and guilty when she got that dish soap, it was like buying marijuana.