Through Thick and Thin Read online

  She checks something in her new book, Zone Perfect Meals in Minutes, fastens Ivy into her high chair, and puts her salmon and tomato under the broiler. She focuses in on the cover of the cookbook, and thinks of how much Meredith loves to cook, always has. No matter how much cooking went on in their childhood, no matter how much Mom loved to be in the kitchen, always cooking, Stephanie never really took to it. She reads the smaller print caption on the spine of the book: 150 Fast & Simple Healthy Recipes! The exclamation point is not actually on the book, she has added it herself. She’s always thought it to be of the utmost importance to embark on things, no matter how hard they might be, with a good and positive attitude. And what better way to exemplify a good, positive attitude than with an exclamation point, really? But even with the exclamation point, she thinks also that maybe the Zone Delivery, the service Caryn used, might be a better idea than she had initially deemed it to be. Surely, having all these Zone Perfect (or Zone Friendly or whatever it is they are) meals arrive in coolers and microwave containers each morning would be so much easier. But the Zone Delivery, something about it, it makes her feel a little bit like a failure.

  She’s home all the time (and all the time in this case is not merely a figure of speech). She should have no problem at all making dinner, even if dinner, now that she is endeavoring to be in the Zone, involves a bit more calculation, is a bit more of a scientific dance than it used to be. It’s not as if in addition to Ivy she has a full-time, incredibly demanding job. People like that could have the Zone Delivery without feeling like a failure; people like the investment banker character in that terrifying book, I Don’t Know How She Does It, the one that is so beloved by the New Mommy Group, even though as far as Stephanie can tell, no one in the New Mommy Group seems to be dashing off to an investment bank, or to any other job for that matter. Stephanie does not know what the New Mommies are thinking of when they hold the book up and exclaim, “This is so me!” When Stephanie thinks of the book, she thinks that the author, Allison Pearson, is married to Anthony Lane, the man who writes the film reviews for the New Yorker. Mostly when Stephanie thinks of the book, she thinks of how she’d like to be the wife of Anthony Lane. And lately, that’s less because she’s always liked his movie reviews, and more because a life lived with Anthony Lane wouldn’t be a life lived with Aubrey.

  And anyway, she thinks, charging $39.99 a day, which is $1,239.69 a month (yes, she’s done the math) would be something she’d need to discuss with Aubrey, in the spirit of communication and honesty that she would like to do her part to perpetuate within their marriage, even though there is the part of her that says, “Face it, sister, it’s gone.” And even if she were to go the way of saying, screw it, when it came to perpetuating a spirit of honesty and communication within the marriage, as some people in her marriage have done, Aubrey would notice the charge on their credit card statement. Or, actually, these days, would he? Does Aubrey even pay the credit card bills anymore? Or has he lost complete interest in that, too? Fuck. She should check on that.

  Once her less-than-intriguing salmon and her tomato are just about broiled, Ivy starts to fuss. It’s because she’s over-tired, but she won’t sleep, possibly because it’s dark out. Since she’s in the high chair already, Stephanie thinks it’s not going to hurt anyone if she gives Ivy just a little mashed banana. Mashed banana, as soothing as it is to Ivy, has in turn become to Stephanie so similar to sleep. She thinks it would be really great it they both slept. She begins to peel a banana and thinks of her own mother, and how their pediatrician told her that fat babies would become fat adults, and how she and Meredith were always on baby diets, and then, look at what that accomplished. She mashes the banana and tries not to worry. She has possibly begun to worry too much, she can see this. She reminds herself, with her back facing the general vicinity of the workroom door, that there are, of course, plenty of things to be happy about.

  Even though they are strictly forbidden on the Zone, along with pasta and rice and many things, Stephanie is happy for mashed bananas. Just a spoonful and Ivy is sitting in her high chair, looking a little sleepy even, murmuring, without any real sense of urgency, “Da Da Da Da.”

  “Yes, Da Da,” Stephanie says back to her, and lifts her out of her high chair and holds her close, with her head on her shoulder and gently rubs her back. Almost instinctively she reaches for the kitchen cordless, mounted like the phones of yesteryear, of her childhood, on the wall. She dials Meredith’s number in New York even though she’ll just leave a message really quickly before she sits down with Ivy to her salmon. To her surprise, it’s not Meredith’s voice mail that picks up after one ring (she has somehow rigged her voice mail to pick up after only one ring) but Meredith.

  “Hey, Meres, what are you doing at home?”

  “I know,” she answers. “I’m being a dedicated dieter, which I think also means I’m being a bad restaurant critic.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking you’d be out.”

  “Well, I figured since it’s the first week, just for the first week, I’m not going to review every night this week. I thought I’d take two nights off from going out, to get all my ducks in a row, Zone-wise.” Even though the only person who could hear her is Stephanie, Meredith lowers her voice and continues, explaining that for the next few weeks, few months, she’s not going to do every dinner and maybe not nearly as many lunches. “I think I could really do okay without lunches for a while. Without lunches, twelve meals a week in restaurants could be closer to six. And anyway,” she continues, “I’ve always been hesitant to review restaurants based on their lunches. Lunches, they’re so different from dinners, so much less of an event.”

  Stephanie listens to the explanation, something about it seems practiced, as if it’s already been repeated several times. “Do you feel okay about it?” she asks.

  “I feel guilty,” Meredith tells her. “But I imagine guilt is good for dieting, right?”

  “Yes, I imagine it is.” Stephanie smiles to herself. “It sounds like you have a good plan, you sound dedicated, good for you.”

  “I went to the Food Emporium and bought Egg Beaters, and sliced chicken breast, and cans of tuna packed in water, artichokes,” Meredith continues quite thoroughly, “and a head of cauliflower and apples. I shopped around the perimeters like it says to in chapter eight.”

  “You got to chapter eight already?” Stephanie asks, instantly impressed.

  “I skipped ahead.”

  “You should try to read the whole thing. You’ll learn a lot.” Stephanie says cautiously.

  “Right, I will.” Meredith says back right away. Meredith, Stephanie knows this, is never a fan of anything that sounds like it might be the start of a lecture, even if it’s a lecture that will help her lose the weight she’s never been able to lose.

  “Anyway,” Stephanie says, not lingering on Meredith’s tone, but rather breezing ahead, “do you know what I learned that I’m so excited about?”

  “No, what?”

  “Okay, Caryn says that if you have fourteen pretzels, one ounce of low-fat mozzarella cheese, and a green apple that it’s a perfect Zone snack. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m having exactly that, for breakfast, lunch, and snack, and then I’m making one of the Zone recipes for dinner.”

  “So wait,” Meredith says, “let me grab a pen. Fourteen pretzels, one ounce of low-fat mozzarella cheese?”

  “Or part-skim, I think that works, too. Is part-skim the same as low-fat?” Stephanie asks.

  “No, it’s not,” Meredith says.

  “Okay, well anyway.”

  “Okay and one green apple?”

  “Right.”

  “Not a red one?”

  “I don’t know, Meredith.”

  “Okay, and that’s the right proportions and blocks and everything?”

  “Yes, Meres.”

  “For someone Caryn’s size or for someone your size, or my size?” Meredith asks, and truth be told, Stephanie, in her excitement over the preap
proved-by-Caryn snack, did not actually account for the different body mass indexes, and the different block ratios for the different weights you may find yourself at, at different stages of the diet. She feels a flare of annoyance, the kind she’s been feeling more and more often lately. She’s not entirely sure if it’s because Meredith won’t be enthusiastic about the snack combination, or because this diet, like so many things lately, is so much harder than she’d expected it to be.

  “I don’t really know,” she admits, and sighs. “I’m going to look it up when we get off the phone.”

  “Okay,” Meredith says. “We can just adjust it if we need to.”

  “Maybe we’ll get seventeen Goldfish pretzels,” Stephanie says, trying, as ever, to look on the bright side.

  “Right, but, Steph?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I’m a little confused. If pretzels are made from white flour? Can we have them?”

  “Oh, well,” and Stephanie feels again, for a second, for maybe more than a second, like she might cry, but stops herself. If she’s not going to cry about Aubrey then she’s not going to cry about Goldfish pretzels. Goldfish pretzels, so youthful and reminiscent of the happier parts of childhood, should not be cried over. “I think it’s fine, Meres,” she says slowly, measuredly, “but listen, if you don’t want to do it that way, there’s a whole book of meal suggestions, I’m sure you can find something else.”

  “No, I want to do what you’re doing. But, Stephanie?” she asks, pausing for a moment and then beginning to speak much faster. “It’s very hard, right? And I know it’s only been four days, but I’m really hungry and I am pretty sure I have a headache and I think I feel a little light-headed if I get up too quickly.” When Meredith sees what she thinks may be an opening, she tends to run off with it. She gallops.

  “It’s been four days.” Stephanie answers, “and you’re supposed to be hungry.”

  “I thought it said somewhere that your blood sugar is supposed to be so balanced that you’re not supposed to feel hungry or headachey or fatigued? I think I feel all those things.”

  “Meres, let’s give it a few more days,” Let’s, she says silently to herself, stop raining on my Zone parade. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay,” Meredith agrees. “But, just, even if they are somehow technically allowed, how possible is it to have an entire bag of those delicious Goldfish pretzels on hand, and only eat fourteen at a time? Can people really do this? And by people, I do mean people whose spirits are, if not broken, then slightly bent, seeing as they are on a diet and therefore might really need and deserve a bag of pretzels anyway?”

  Stephanie doesn’t say anything, instead she waits for a moment for the Goldfish pretzels to stop tormenting Meredith on their own. And after a longer pause, Meredith asks, “How’s Ivy?”

  “Oh, she’s good, she’s right here. She woke up for some reason. I’m not sure why. So I gave her a little snack and she actually just fell asleep while we were talking.”

  “Oh, sleep. Good,” Meredith says softly.

  “Yes, very, very good. Maybe I should go test the waters and see if it’ll actually stick if I put her back in her crib.”

  “Oh, of course, I’ll let you go.”

  Stephanie contemplates the walk to the stairs, through the family room, past the door downstairs to the workroom. She predicts Ivy waking up like clockwork the moment she tries to put her down, or even, just going down into her crib and everything being so quiet. “I have another minute,” she says.

  “What’d you give Ivy for her snack?” Meredith asks. Stephanie wonders if it’s more of a polite question, something to connect them in case this bonding by dieting doesn’t work, or if Meredith might be inquiring after Ivy’s food because she’s sure it’s more interesting than her own.

  “Bananas.”

  “You know if we stay on this diet we can’t have bananas, like ever again?”

  “I think it’s fine,” Stephanie says even though inwardly she shudders a little bit at a world without bananas, and not just because of Ivy, and not just because of sleep.

  Meredith exhales, not loudly, but a little bit more than the regular breathing out, and asks, “How can you look at the world, at your future, and know that, if you’re doing what’s right, if you’re doing what’s best for yourself, then there won’t ever again be bananas?”

  Stephanie wonders what sorts of things Meredith might be equating with bananas right now, what other things she worries might never again be in her life (Josh, a boyfriend, a life beyond her career). She wonders what things she herself would equate with bananas right now (a husband who isn’t in an emotional coma, a world that wasn’t shrinking in on her, Martha Stewart calling to offer her a job). “I think you’re being melodramatic,” she says.

  “I’m not sure if I am.”

  “Well, maybe not then, but I think you’re having the wrong attitude.”

  “Maybe,” Meredith concedes, albeit briefly, “but what if I’m not?”

  “I don’t know, Mere,” she says because she can’t think of anything else to say, “I really don’t.”

  After they’d gotten off the phone, after Stephanie ate her Zone-friendly dinner alone, with one hand, while Ivy slept on her shoulder because she didn’t want to risk waking her up and she also didn’t want to put her down, she gets up and starts down the hall. She stops halfway through the family room, and looks at the door to Aubrey’s workroom, and she goes to it and opens it. She stands at the top of the stairs, rubbing Ivy’s back in soft circles, comforted by the softness of her lavender velour onesie, comforted by the softness of her daughter’s little body underneath.

  She’s aware of the light behind her flooding into the barely lit basement and she wonders if Aubrey is aware of it, too, if he’s aware of anything. The light from his computer screen glows out at him, and she can’t see what’s on it. She wonders if it matters whether it’s Internet poker, an Internet pen pal, or even Internet porn, if she really cares what the reason is anymore.

  Aubrey’s leaning back in his chair and even though he’s looking right at the screen, he doesn’t seem to really care about what’s on it either. Maybe it’s gained a lot of weight, too. She’d thought for a while that was it, that it was because she had gained so much weight, that that’s when he lost interest in her, when he disengaged. But then, their friends aren’t fat, and even the friends that are just his, not theirs, they’re not fat. And his job isn’t fat, or the world, or Ivy.

  If he were having an affair, she thinks he’d be nicer. She thinks he’d be guiltier, and she thinks that would make him charming and salesmany again, which are things she once liked about him, even though now she can’t imagine why. She imagines if he were having an affair he’d try to cover up for it by doing nice things for her. He’d buy her little presents, he’d send her roses. She smiles in spite of everything, in spite of the flowers he would send her if he were cheating on her, at the memory of how much she always loved it when he used to send her roses, at how happy she used to be.

  She turns and shuts the door. As she walks away from it, she does know she could confront him. She could say so many things, she could demand so many answers. She could brace herself for when he looked up at her, so much like Rob Lowe in About Last Night, explaining to Demi Moore, “I don’t love you anymore.” And as much as she knows she could, she isn’t sure she can. For as long as she can remember, when everyone else would describe her as so sweet, so nice, an amazing friend, a wonderful person, a fantastic athlete, a lovely woman, she had always smiled. But she’d also wondered why no one ever described her as strong. Because that was always what she’d seen herself as, was always the first thing she thought of when she thought of herself. She wonders sometimes if it was never true. But she doesn’t think that’s it, she thinks it’s more that now, everything has changed.

  seven

  the strangest things seem suddenly routine

  Understanding the implications of the Zone ca
n completely change your life. All you have to do is read this book, follow the simple dietary guidelines it recommends, and put them to work for you in your own life.

  Meredith stares at the words on the page, stares longer until her vision blurs. The Zone might be, for her, kind of like New Jersey. She looks away from the page. She’d like to think it could be possible that dieting—successful dieting, whatever that might be—might be best actually done, rather than read about. And yet with the Zone, she wonders if she’s really ready, if in her early stages of remedial reading maybe she hasn’t quite learned enough. A mystery, she thinks, wrapped inside of a riddle. (She is reminded of the way they wrap dates in bacon at Pipa, on the lower level of ABC Carpet & Home; she’s always been a tremendous fan.)

  But she has determined—she thinks—to face this challenge. She has resolved to embrace the very team-spirited and inherently athletic focus Stephanie has spelled out for them. It shouldn’t be that hard. Even though she’s never been the “sporty one” (or the nice one, or the pretty one, which may or may not have simply meant the thin one) she’d like to think she has at times taken an athlete’s approach to things. Anyone who works as hard as she does has an athlete somewhere inside. Anyone who is willing to have upwards of twelve meals a week in restaurants, anyone who has a job in which there is always something to do, always more to be done, can think of herself as athletic in some respect, and surely, can handle the challenges of a diet. This is what she tells herself, this is what she wants to believe.

  Ever since her fifteenth year, when her mother first took her to the Diet Center in Chevy Chase—she can still remember the parking lot, the waiting room, the bran muffins and the vitamin tins she received, Mom looking nervous and worried but trying not to show it—she’d never been able to see dieting as anything but certain failure. But if Stephanie is going to do this, in her cheerful, optimistic, and ever-sporting way, if Stephanie is going to succeed at this, then she wants to as well. Meredith has always suspected that Stephanie has been better at running her own life, what with the perfect husband and the perfect baby and the perfect house. Though it isn’t Stephanie who is perfectly poised for the New York Times to call (thus usurping Douglas Harris, editor in chief of The NY, as her employer but also as the placer of the best phone call she ever answered), and then what? A three-book deal? Film rights? Her own television show?