The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Okay,” she said. “You use whatever method you want. I’ll help you. I’ve been dieting all my life. I can show you lots of things that will really help. And men lose weight much faster than women; you’ll lose a good five to seven pounds a week.”

  He looked up at her, full of hope.

  “Really,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said, sighing, and she clapped her hands together, then pretended it had been to try to catch a fly buzzing around the room. “Missed,” she said, pointing to the black speck on the wall.

  On Saturday, they go to the mall to buy good walking shoes. “You could be a role model for men,” Marsha tells Tom. “By admitting that you’re going on a diet, you could give other men permission to—”

  “Please, Marsha.”

  “What.”

  “Don’t get all New Age on me.”

  “I’m not! This is a vital service you could provide. A great inspiration. A lot of men really need to lose weight, but they don’t know how to—”

  “Oy.” He covers his ears. “Stop.”

  “Fine,” Marsha says.

  Just this morning, Tom selected his very own weight loss clinic, he won’t say where, but it’s a place where you meet with a counselor one-on-one, every day, and you get weighed every day, too. He has been given a little notebook where he is meant to record what he eats. To show her support, Marsha has said she’ll go on the same diet, and she will rely on Tom to tell her what she can and can’t have. She thinks it will keep him from feeling emasculated—he has described the waiting room at the clinic, the plastic roses, the pink walls. But would it be so awful for him to thank his wife for praising him? Couldn’t he consider her suggestions instead of covering his ears like a three-year-old?

  Marsha picks up the pace, making sure that Tom is continually just a little behind her. They bought their shoes, and now they are going to find a place to have lunch. They pass a few windows where Marsha would like to stop and look at the merchandise, but never mind, it’s more important to punish her husband for another five minutes or so. The truth is, he doesn’t even know she’s punishing him, but Marsha knows, and that’s the important thing. Her self-esteem and all. Her ability to confront an issue when it happens. She imagines her therapist sitting in her comfortable armchair in her blue office giving her a thumbs-up. Not that Marsha really likes her therapist, she hates her therapist. She would like to talk about that sometime, but imagine the awkwardness. It would be like a picture in a picture in a picture or something. Anyway, why bring it up; as soon as Marsha gets some more self-esteem, she’s going to dump her therapist. God. The annoying way she has of leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, saying, “Can you tell me more about that?”

  “I am!” Marsha always wants to say. “I am telling you about it!” But instead she nods and dutifully finds some other detail to include, some other item to add to whatever sorrowful laundry list she has dragged out for the day. Oh, therapy is an awful thing. Who started it anyway? Did some cavewoman go on way too long to another cavewoman who, after she listened, said, “Okay, next time? I’m going to have to charge you for that.” A friend of Marsha’s recently told her, “You’re not supposed to like therapy. It’s supposed to be painful. That’s how you know it’s working.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Marsha began, full of outrage, of argument, but then nothing followed. She was like a car engine that turned over and quit. Sputter sputter stall. Sputter sputter stall. Anyway, therapy was helping—Marsha felt happier, stronger, more optimistic. But the magazines she could buy with what she spent on therapy! Once she mentioned that, and her therapist said, “So you feel that you’re not entitled to therapy and a magazine.” Marsha answered by scratching the side of her neck and looking out the window. Then she looked at her watch.

  “Well, our time is just about up,” she said, and the therapist said, “How about if I be the one to decide that?”

  Marsha decides to stop punishing Tom and slows down to match her stride to his. “I’m starving,” she tells him.

  “No,” Tom says. “We’re on a diet, remember? You can’t eat now. It’s ten-forty. It’s not even eating time.”

  “Well, then I want a coffee,” Marsha says. “I need something.”

  They go to the stylish kiosk, and Marsha looks at the menu. “A large café caramel, please,” she tells the kid, the barista, she supposes. Behind her, Tom snorts. She turns around. “What.”

  “That is not ‘a coffee.’ That is a liquid sundae.” When the kid asks what kind of coffee Tom wants, he says, “I’m fine.”

  “I can have this,” Marsha says. “I just have to count it.”

  “Uh-huh,” Tom says. Then he says, “You’re going to be very bad at this.”

  Marsha feels the blood rise in her face. Who does he think he’s talking to, some novice, some rank beginner like him? “Do you know how many diets I’ve been on?” she asks.

  “My point,” he says, lightly.

  She sucks the whipped cream off her coffee. Chews it. “I’m not even starting today, anyway,” she says. “I’ll start tomorrow.”

  At lunch, Tom gets a salad and Marsha gets a cheeseburger with barbecue sauce and bacon, and waffle fries, which she loads up with salt, because she, as opposed to some people, does not have high blood pressure.

  On Sunday morning, when Tom comes downstairs, Marsha says, “I can’t start today, either. I forgot and ate breakfast.”

  “What did you have?”

  “Grape-Nuts.” And a lot of sugar sprinkled on top, she does not add.

  Tom scratches his head, yawns. “Well, you can still start today, but I’m going to have to penalize you. That’s too much starch.”

  “Too much starch,” Marsha says.

  “Right.” He pulls out a carton of fat-free yogurt from the refrigerator and closes the door with his hip, which Marsha has never seen him do and finds effeminate.

  “Exactly how much starch can I have?” she asks.

  “A piece of bread.”

  “How many times a day?”

  “Once.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Once!” he says. “You get one piece of bread a day!”

  “Go to hell,” Marsha says. “I’m not doing this diet. It’s stupid. I’m doing Weight Watchers, where you eat whatever you want so long as you—”

  “I told you it wasn’t going to be easy. And you said”—and here Tom does his high-voiced imitation of Marsha—

  “I know, but I can do it! I want to be on the same diet as you, I want to support you! And it will be easier to cook if we’re on the same diet!”

  Marsha runs her tongue back and forth across her front teeth, thinking. Then she says, “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me that thing about the bread. You know how much I like bread.”

  “Do what you want,” Tom says. He begins eating his yogurt. He makes it look good. It makes Marsha want some, and now she’s gone and had Grape-Nuts, a.k.a. Too Much Starch.

  “Fine,” Marsha answers. “I’ll do your diet from whatever cockamamie clinic you go to, which probably isn’t even accredited and is staffed by charlatans.”

  Tom loads up his spoon again, leans over toward Marsha. “A tip: If you cut the bread in half, it seems like more. Piece in the morning, piece at night.”

  Salads. Salads, salads, salads, that’s what they eat. And cantaloupe and pineapple and watermelon and apples cut into little pieces, which they eat with toothpicks in order to make it seem “fun.” They eat chicken breasts and chicken breasts and chicken breasts, and one time Marsha puts pineapple and green and red peppers and onions on top and calls it “Festive Hawaiian chicken.” She actually says this; she puts the dish down before Tom and says, “Voilà: Festive Hawaiian chicken.”

  “Aren’t you mixing metaphors?” Tom asks, and she tells him never mind, this is just to make them feel excited about eating, for a change.

  “Know what would make me excited?” Tom asks. “A three-inch steak, that’s what wou
ld make me excited.”

  “Fettuccine Alfredo,” Marsha says. “Apple crisp with vanilla ice cream.”

  “Don’t even go there,” Tom says. Which Marsha thinks makes him sound both effeminate and Valley Girl.

  The next Saturday, when they’re out taking a walk, they decide to go to one of their favorite pizza parlors for lunch, but they agree they’ll only get a Greek salad. But then Marsha says she thinks she’ll get a seafood pocket instead. No potato chips to accompany it, no Coke, nothing like that. Water. Water and a little seafood pocket.

  “You can’t have that,” Tom says.

  Marsha lets go of his hand. “Why not? It just has a little mayonnaise on it. We’re allowed to have salad dressing.”

  “Not the same,” Tom says.

  “Is too,” Marsha says.

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “Look,” Tom says, “I’m not going to argue with you. If you want a sub sandwich, get a sub sandwich.”

  Marsha stops walking and turns to face him. “I didn’t say sub sandwich. I said seafood pocket! I used to get the spicy Italian, extra cheese! Now I’m only getting a FUCKING SEAFOOD POCKET!”

  From behind her, Marsha hears the short, tight exhalations of a jogger. Their next-door neighbor, Marty, runs past them. “Hey,” he pants, holding up a hand.

  “Hey,” they say back, together, and watch him run off. Not an ounce of fat on that one. Or on his wife.

  Tom turns back to Marsha and speaks quietly. “Either you do this diet or you don’t.”

  Marsha orders the Greek salad. And when she has finished she is no longer hungry and crabby. She is grateful that she stayed on the diet, and she tells her husband that.

  “That’s right,” he says. “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”

  What kind of weird clinic is he going to? Marsha wonders. “You already told me that one,” she says.

  “Okay, then, how about this: Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.”

  Marsha thinks about this. Then she says, “Not true.”

  “I know,” Tom says, and sighs.

  Marsha uses the toilet, takes off her pajamas, pushes all the air out of her lungs, and steps on the scale. Five pounds down! She steps off, gingerly, as if the scale might grab her by the arm, pull her back on, and show her her real weight. She dresses and brushes her teeth, thinks maybe she’ll skip breakfast, how about that! Give ’em the old one-two! She finds herself doing a little dance, and she laughs out loud. From out in the hall, she hears Tom ask what’s so funny.

  She opens the bathroom door. “Have you lost much weight?”

  “Twelve pounds,” he says, with something like wonder in his voice.

  She stops smiling. Nods. Lifts the hair up off her neck and blows air out of her cheeks.

  “You?” he asks.

  “Uh-huh,” she says and shuts the door again.

  Weeks later, at eleven A.M., which is close enough to noon, Marsha is about to sit down to a lunch of eggplant parm; focaccia, which she will dip into olive oil spiced with red pepper; and Caesar salad, extra dressing. She got takeout from her favorite Italian restaurant. You have to cheat sometimes or you crack up. At Weight Watchers, they know this; you can bank points for just such an occasion. Tom’s diet is ridiculous; it thinks you’re an automaton who can just eat the same thing every day. When the phone rings, she answers in a voice meant to convey hurry; she wants to eat quickly and get rid of the evidence right away. Tom is out of town on business, but still. She didn’t even eat at the restaurant in case a mutual friend saw her and let it slip to Tom.

  “Hello?” she says, breathlessly.

  “Just landed,” Tom says. “Are you being good?”

  Silence.

  “Marsha?”

  “Oh, Tom, I was going to cheat. I guess it’s good you called. I won’t now. I really won’t.”

  “Good girl,” he says, like he’s talking to a dog. On a diet.

  Nine pounds down, and they are out for Marsha’s birthday. They have allowed themselves a steak, which they shared so as to have the proper-size portion, and even at that, there’s some left over. “I’ll bring it home for Ditzy,” Marsha says.

  Tom raises an eyebrow. “You know what they say at the clinic?”

  “What,” Marsha asks tiredly.

  “The dog doesn’t need it, either.”

  Marsha leaves the steak but tells Tom that she will be stopping for an ice cream on the way home, it is her birthday and she can have ice cream on her birthday.

  “You need to learn not to reward yourself with food,” Tom says.

  She stares at him.

  “It’s true.”

  She sits back in the booth. “So where’s my jewelry, then?”

  He grins, reaches in his jacket pocket, and pulls out a black velvet box. Marsha gasps and covers her mouth with her hands.

  “See?” he says.

  Down the street from Tom and Marsha live two sisters about seven and nine years old, entrepreneurial towheads who perform acrobatics on their front lawn between going in and out of various businesses. They were the Wonderful Weed Pullers until a person who hired them realized they were not so very expert at distinguishing a weed from a plant. They offered homemade greeting cards for every occasion, then porch washing. Now they have gone into the dog-walking business. Just this morning, Marsha found in her mailbox a hand-lettered flyer that began “Does your dog spend the whole day just lownging on the sofa?” But Marsha’s favorite part was at the end: “And of course the prices are always lower if you act right away. First person who calls will get to pay only twenty cents for a half hour of dog play. (Our charge for walking around the block will still be a quarter, sorry.)”

  Marsha decides to bake brownies for them. She doesn’t want any, she truly doesn’t, but she wants to bake something, she just wants the smell, and she wants to use her professional-size Mixmaster and her beautiful heart-shaped stainless steel measuring cups and spoons, which she had just gotten at Williams-Sonoma on the very day Tom came home depressed from the doctor’s office. He is off golfing; he won’t be home for hours. Marsha had planned to pay the bills and clean, and when Tom got home they were going to try a new sushi restaurant. She’ll make and deliver the brownies—get them out of the house!—and then she’ll pay the bills while she breathes in that heavenly, lingering scent.

  She finds the butter, the fancy chocolate, the nuts. She breaks eggs into the big metal bowl, adds salt and vanilla, which she inhales deeply before adding to the bowl. When the batter is done, she has one little taste to make sure there is enough salt, usually you have to add just a bit more salt to the batter than they say. A bit more salt, a bit more vanilla. You can only tell by tasting; you can’t rely completely on a recipe, it is really only an approximation. Baking is not a science; it’s an art.

  Marsha is in the family room when Tom comes home. All the blinds are drawn, and the television is on and Marsha is lying on the sofa watching Bette Davis say, “It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Well. Truer words were never spoken.

  Marsha sits up and uses the remote to turn off the television. Which is part of the problem. A nation of obese people who spend all their time designing labor-saving devices. When what everyone needs is to go out into the fields and walk behind the plow horse!

  “Marsha?” Tom calls.

  “Everything in this culture conspires against the dieter,” Marsha says.

  Tom comes into the family room, his golf shirt tucked into his pants for the first time in…how long? Who knows. “Why’s it so dark in here?” He starts to raise the shades and Marsha says, “Don’t. I’m watching movies.”

  Tom raises the shades anyway. “Marsha? What’s wrong?”

  “Everything in this culture conspires against the dieter,” she repeats, and he sits in his La-Z-Boy recliner (see?) and asks again what’s wrong, and now Marsha begins to cry and blubber.

  “You have a bad of owies?” Tom asks. “What does that me
an?”

  “I ate a pan of brownies,” Marsha says.

  Tom nods slowly. “I see.”

  “Don’t say anything!”

  “I didn’t. I won’t.”

  Marsha gets off the sofa and moves to the window. Earlier in the day, there had been a beautiful cardinal at the feeder; now no birds are there. “I am fifty-seven years old,” she tells Tom.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Once, many years ago when I was in New York City, I saw a woman on the elevator and she looked really familiar, and I said, ‘Are you Helen Gurley Brown?’ and she lowered her head kind of shyly and nodded that she was. And then I said something inane, like ‘Oh, nice to meet you,’ but I was mostly just staring at how thin she was. She was so thin, and really, she was kind of old then. And I had just recently read that she wore makeup to bed, that her husband didn’t know this, but that she actually wore makeup to bed because she would never let him see her without it. And I remember thinking, God, is that dumb. I will never be so dumb. But you know what, Tom? I am that dumb.”

  “You wear makeup to bed?” He’s very nearly whispering.

  “No! But I keep dieting and dieting and dieting and I just…I just…It doesn’t work! I diet; I lose; it comes back on. I diet; I lose; it comes back on. I just can’t keep it off, and now especially I can’t because my body does not want me to, estrogen is stored in fat cells, and I need to get estrogen some way because I don’t make it anymore because I don’t have any more periods, I haven’t menstruated for years, I don’t even have a single tampon in the whole house!”

  “Whoa,” Tom says, laughing. “This might be TMI, too much information.”

  Marsha spins around angrily. “I know what TMI is! And don’t say that! Don’t say it! You don’t talk that way, you never used to say things like that! That’s a girl thing to say!”

  “No, it isn’t,” Tom says. “Guys at work—”

  “Well, you say other things you never used to say, and they are just girl things. I’m sorry, but they are.”