Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  The first thing that DB Sweeney does when they walk into the apartment is turn around and look at Meredith, right into her eyes, for what feels like a long time. It’s not the kind of long time that you wish would end soon, it’s the kind where you feel it would be okay if it kept going on for a while.

  “This is home,” Meredith says and she tries to infuse the word with warmth and safety.

  He turns his head back to face forward and stands just in front of her, still by the door, surveying his surroundings. Slowly, alternately sniffing the ground, the air above him and around him, he begins to investigate. He walks through the kitchen, throughout the living room, stopping outside closet doors that Meredith opens for him. He investigates the bedroom, the vanity, the bathroom. He returns to the living room and sits for a while in front of the armoire. Meredith, who has been following him around the apartment, both in awe of his summary and checking to make sure there is no danger that could befall him, anywhere, wonders if he knows the armoire is important because that’s where the Bose iPod dock is, and where the speakers are. She thinks she should make a playlist for him, for when he’s alone, and she doesn’t want him to be alone.

  After a while longer, after walking the length of the couch, along the top if it, DB Sweeney settles down on the corner section. He places his paws elegantly, gingerly in front of him and sighs. She hopes that it is not a sigh of resignation, but rather one of accomplishment, one of “I surveyed my surroundings and now I will rest within them.” She hopes so. Meredith walks the few steps over to the couch, and stands in front of the corner section. In the very back of her mind, she remembers that she didn’t quite make it to Barnes & Noble, that she didn’t get the Atkins book, that she didn’t take the first step she was going to take on her own. She’s pretty sure it doesn’t matter.

  She kneels down, right in front of DB Sweeney. For the first time since Stephanie said, “Don’t call me” (or maybe, even, it’s been a bit longer than that), Meredith doesn’t feel so alone. DB Sweeney looks up at her with his sharp, inquisitive, chocolate-brown eyes. He puts one paw out and then another, and repeats the motion a few times so he is slowly but surely dragging himself on his belly. He stops when he is right in front of her. He reaches his nose up and so gingerly, so tentatively, he licks Meredith’s face. And then, with increasing sureness, he continues to lick. Buoyed, he soon has his front paws on each of Meredith shoulders. He’s on his hind legs, still licking, wagging his tail so quickly as he proceeds.

  For the first time in a really long time, Meredith starts to cry.

  thirteen

  women who lock themselves away and only eat leeks don’t get fat

  Stephanie wraps a towel around herself and walks quickly back into her bedroom. She glances at the baby monitor: all quiet on the Ivy front. And then her eyes fall again on the cover of the book. She’d brought it upstairs with her last night and had placed it, perhaps a bit reverentially, on the dresser. She places her hand flat against the dust jacket and swipes at it, even though there’s no possible way there could be any dust. She looks at the cover, at the slender French stick figure marching across it, a lithe illustration to guide her way, to shine a light upon her darkness. French Women Don’t Get Fat.

  She puts the book down and changes quickly into some comfortable Sunday clothes. She pulls on loose black loungy bottoms and an old Lehigh sweatshirt. She can’t remember where she picked up this sweatshirt that has long been her favorite; she doesn’t know anyone who went to Lehigh and it has no sentimental value. She looks at herself in the mirror, also quickly, at what she still thinks of as Sunday clothes, loungy clothes, even though now, more and more often, such an ensemble will make an appearance Monday through Friday, to say nothing of Saturday. She pulls her still-wet hair back into a loose ponytail and hurries downstairs to boil her leeks.

  To tell you the truth, she didn’t read the whole book.

  There was a lot in the introduction about food preparation. A lot of things about food preparation tend to be off-putting to Stephanie, especially now. And then there was this part about how you aren’t supposed to read or even watch TV or look at the computer (even something other than UrbanBaby) while you are eating. Stephanie reads the newspaper while she is eating. It’s the only time she can find in the entire day to do so. When would she read the newspaper? And then there was this whole thing about how there was no glory in quick weight loss. Really, she was certain there was. It was right about then that she’d started to lose hope.

  But then—then!—as soon as she had disconsolately skipped ahead just a few pages, she got to the beautiful section about the “Magical Leek Weekend.” As had in fact been mentioned to her before, what you’re supposed to do is boil up two pounds of leeks and eat only leeks and drink the leek juice for forty-eight hours. It “recasts” you and magically gets you to a place where you can eat delicious foods for pleasure. In the glow of the light from the end of the tunnel, Stephanie did wonder if maybe the “Magical Leek Weekend” might also make her, in the manner of French women everywhere, chic. Seeing as it was magical and all. In addition to not getting fat, she didn’t imagine French women often became slovenly and unkempt either, didn’t imagine French women spent a lot of time in a faded Lehigh sweatshirt, whose origins are a mystery, and leggings.

  Once she’s gotten the two pounds of leeks clean, and it takes a really long time to get two pounds of leeks clean, Stephanie boils them up, thinking all the while that there is indeed glory in quick weight loss and that such glory will be hers at the end of a mere forty-eight hours.

  She doesn’t know if it’s all in her mind, but at the end of a mere two hours, she has a pounding headache. It is all she can do not to eat Ivy’s various homemade baby foods and mashes, to take them right from her little baby hands, as she feeds her lunch.

  By three o’clock, as Ivy is at last napping again, it is all Stephanie can do to lie listless in the family room, sipping leek broth, mesmerized by the vivid blues and reds and greens of Baby Van Gogh.

  By nine-thirty she sits in the kitchen, filled with hostility. She makes herself an English muffin, and eats it. Thinking that the English muffin would have been better had she taken the time to spread something on it, she eats several large spoonfuls of the Le Pain Quotidien (French!) hazelnut spread that Meredith brought with her on her last visit. Next, she stands by the window and looks out as she eats some peanut butter right from the jar, enveloped by this new and yet somehow familiar sense of failure. She looks at a streetlamp and imagines they still live in the city, and there are lights twinkling everywhere. She rinses her plate and her two spoons before putting them in the dishwasher and turns to head upstairs.

  The phone rings. She thinks maybe it’s Meredith and thinks that she’s the person she most wants to talk to in the world right now, but she can’t. She thinks that like other people who live in this house, even if that word, live, is loosely defined, she just can’t deal with this right now. But she doesn’t know what else to do.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, Aubrey,” she says, and she softens for a moment because she forgets everything. How could she forget anything? How, after the months of the way he has been? And then she remembers, and she hardens. She thinks she has to, it has to go that way, there can’t be any other way.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Are you in Chicago?”

  “No, I’m in the city. I got a room at the Athletic Club. I just needed to think. I just, I knew that you knew. I went down there and everything was out, and I saw it and saw it for what you must have seen and I had to get out of there, and I couldn’t, I can’t really talk to you about this. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Stephanie.”

  “Aubrey,” she says. Oh, Aubrey, she thinks and the things she feels—sympathy for him, an urge to protect him, sorrow—aren’t what she wants to feel. She wants only to feel angry at him, to feel lied to, and let down, to feel abandoned and betrayed. And she doesn’t know
what it might mean, what it might say about her, that she wants those things. “How long has this been going on?” she asks.

  “A while,” he answers vaguely.

  “Since you had knee surgery?”

  “Uh. Uh-huh.”

  “That’s longer than Ivy’s been alive,” she says, and she says it softly because that makes it so much worse to her, and she wonders if it makes it so much worse to him, if anything does. “Why did you start?”

  “Steph, I don’t want to do this.”

  “I know.”

  “First, it was for the pain. And then it just, it just started as a way to take the edge off, you know?”

  “I don’t, Aubrey. I really don’t.”

  “And then it just got to the point where everything was an edge. And then it got to the point where I just couldn’t imagine my life without it. I’m going to stop. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  She wishes for a manual, and she wishes for an instruction book. She pictures a paint-by-numbers book, with directions inside that are easy to follow. She wonders if something like that could help her.

  “I think I should come home,” he says after a while. And she thinks of Ivy. She thinks maybe she shouldn’t be in the house with him. She wonders if maybe she should be in the house without him, if maybe he needs to stay in the city for a while, but that’s a whole can of worms, isn’t it? And it’s a very visible can of worms, the kind that a lot of people in Ridgewood could see and she thinks that if she had a manual, in it, it would say, Aubrey needs a therapist, and she thinks she’s thought that already before.

  “I think you need to see someone.”

  “What?”

  “Like a group or a therapist.”

  “God, Stephanie. I don’t know.”

  “What?” she asks him. “What don’t you know?”

  “I never thought I’d be in therapy.”

  “Well, I guess we never thought a lot of things.”

  “I think I should come home.”

  “Will you see someone? I can find someone for you. I can help.”

  He doesn’t say anything, and then he says, “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she says to him, to too many things, even as she suspects that she shouldn’t. Okay might not be what is suggested in the handy manual she would so like for there to be, if there were actually a book you could buy, What to Do When Your Husband Is a Drug Addict. Come to think of it though, maybe there is. She looks on the nightstand, at the most likely never-to-be-opened-again copy of French Women Don’t Get Fat, and thinks there’s a book for almost everything else.

  “Okay, Aubrey,” she says. “Okay.”

  fourteen

  fun, interactive activities

  Meredith makes a right onto Fourth Street and heads down the block toward Knife + Fork where she’ll be having the reasonably priced and quite inventive prix fixe menu. As she approaches, she’s trying to remember if there were in fact a lot of carbs in the prix fixe menu the last time she visited. She doesn’t think there were; she remembers being impressed with the quality of the meats and she remembers thinking good things about the vegetables. But the carbs, of course, they could have been there (as they have a way of being) and she could have just not paid attention to them. Because there was a time, a time that now seems so far away, when carbs weren’t wrong, when their very existence didn’t have to be fled from. There was a time. That time is not now.

  In the two weeks since DB Sweeney’s arrival, Meredith has come into possession of Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (she ordered it online, next day delivery, sometimes it’s just so much easier that way). She has not eaten more than twenty grams of carbs per day, and in case you’ve never actually jumped on the bandwagon that is Atkins, ten grams of carbs is about a cup of raw vegetables or a slice of tomato (which isn’t allowed anyway, we’ll explain that later). And she has to say for the record, it wasn’t actually as hard as she thought it would be. She’s prepared a variety of sausages and shared them with DB Sweeney. She’s ordered bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches at the deli on Lexington Avenue, right by the subway, the kind she had not ever considered eating before, even though she hadn’t been dieting. They were just not something she felt a person should eat. But eat them she did after sliding the bacon, egg, and cheese from the roll, and giving the roll to DB Sweeney.

  It was very unfortunate when after a week of Atkins, DB Sweeney threw up repeatedly and developed a bad case of diarrhea, possibly due to the Canadian bacon she’d taken to frying, or possibly due to the pork rinds (yes, really, pork rinds, which are an Atkins-approved snack), and she’d had to take him to the vet, who was nothing at all like the vet played by Chris O’Donnell on Grey’s Anatomy, not in the slightest. The vet said DB Sweeney should perhaps lessen his intake of human food and had given him prescription Fantomycide, which was, he said, the equivalent of doggie Pepcid or doggie Zantac, if you will. He’d given it to her in a bottle that said DB Isley and she’d had to resist a strange and rather strong urge to tell him that DB Sweeney’s last name was Sweeney.

  It was upon contemplating that it was she who had driven her mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix to projectile vomiting and more than a little ill-timed diarrhea that her enthusiasm for the Atkins diet began to wane. And yet, she soldiers on. (But she no longer shares her Atkins food with DB Sweeney.)

  She has rearranged her reviewing schedule. She’s been drinking her coffee with heavy cream. She has found herself quite buoyed by the fact that a restaurant reviewer in New York could find steak houses to review until her cholesterol-addled heart was content, until the cows, quite literally, came home. And even though Knife + Fork is not a steak house, she feels she can persevere, can stay the course, even though last time she was here she’d been so impressed with the care that had been taken with the bread, how the charming waitress had gone to the trouble of explaining that all the baking was done right on the premises.

  She has had a low, throbbing headache for the last two weeks straight. She has felt extremely fatigued, much more so than usual. She has felt a new, heightened sense of irritability for all matters not directly related to DB Sweeney or the acquisition of necessities for him (there are so many things to buy!). She has had a foul and sour taste in her mouth which she suspects might translate into the “meat breath” that was referenced in the book, along with a helpful suggestion to partake of some of the parsley surely served as the garnish on the potato (that could not be eaten) that came on the same plate as her porterhouse, rib eye, or butterflied filet. The parsley didn’t help. She has lost five and a half pounds.

  And five and a half pounds is not nothing.

  Her cell phone starts to ring. She stops midstride, almost teetering off her calf-colored knee-high high-heeled boots, the ones she bought knowing she would never wear in real life. Among the many merits of spending so much of your time in disguise, pretending to be someone else, is being able to buy things you’d never actually wear, because even if you wouldn’t, there’s a chance that someone wearing a wig and carrying a credit card that says either Abby, May, Emily, or Sarah would. She grabs the phone quickly (it’s about to ring twice!) and glances at the display. Private number. She hates that. It could be the restaurant about her reservation, so to be on the safe side, she scans her memory quickly to recall which name she used for her reservation tonight, which credit card she slipped into the front section of her wallet before she left her apartment and a slightly forlorn looking DB Sweeney.

  “This is May,” she says, with sureness, with confidence.

  “This is bullshit!” comes the speedy and somewhat venomous reply.

  She can picture him, there behind his gigantic glass desk, the East River shimmering through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, his expensive suit, a custom-made shirt with his initials stitched under the pocket, the deliberate cuff links, the product-heavy hair worn too long, the beginnings of a double chin, the beady eyes. Doogie, she thinks, almost reflexively. Doogie is also known
as Douglas Harris, editor in chief of The NY, but Meredith had determined at some point previous that calling him, mostly only in her mind, Doogie, sometimes makes his offensive and expletive-laden existence a bit easier to take/exist with/work for. She starts to tuck her hair behind her ears and then remembers she’s wearing a wig, the shoulder-length, very light blonde one, and hopes she hasn’t knocked it off-kilter. She puts her hand on her hip, mostly to keep it away from her hair, and also, a little bit to steady herself. She clears her throat quickly. “Hi, Douglas.”

  “I’ve got copy on my desk. Your next two reviews. The Palm? Meredith? What is innovative or new or interesting or happening or hip or alive or now about the Palm?” he says it all very quickly, as if it is one word, one sought-after media concept, Hiporaliveornow. “Except for the fact that you can walk there from the office, what are you doing at the Palm, and why for the love of fucking I don’t know what are you writing a review of it?”

  Meredith clears her throat, “Douglas, you’ll see that I’ve sent two reviews and the one after that is—”

  “Fucking Sparks! Are you fucking kidding me? Did you get a fucking time machine and go back to 1990? Meredith, we don’t pay you to write reviews about restaurants people don’t want to read reviews about. We pay you to be innovative, to be industrious, to go to new places. And I’m reading these reviews? Did you fucking eat anything other than the steak? Because the descriptions of that are the only parts that sound remotely fucking like you. They suck.”

  “I can understand that you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” he says, rather calmly.