by Alida Nugent
The Grilled Cheese That Changed My Life
It’s a Friday night, just late enough to be almost too late to leave the house, and I am running back and forth between my closet and the TV during the commercial breaks of the Sex and the City movie. I want to make sure I don’t miss the part where Carrie gets dumped minutes before her wedding. It’s my favorite part. She beats him with flowers while wearing a bird on her head and it’s some Lynchian-film-student-wore-some-stilettos kinda shit. I have a handful of my new best friend—chips that are baked, not fried, and which smell like feet—and I’m sipping gin through a straw.
“Girls’ night OUT,” I chirp to no one. I am staring sideways into the full-length mirror after doing a quick jump-thigh shimmy-jump into a cheap black dress, checking to see if you can see the Spanx line. A pound of hairspray and fifteen layers of one-dollar wet n wild lipstick later, and I am ready to go. I am a shrine to Victoria’s Secret fragrances. I am suck-your-stomach-in Barbie. I am tottering on high heels and hoping that nobody notices my love handles. I notice them, and I keep making dry CBS-approved jokes to the mirror about how they should call them hate handles. I am hoping nobody notices my muffin top. I notice it, and like an amateur female standup comic somewhere in Reno, I could go on for five to seven minutes about it.
I flip the channel to Mean Girls while I finish my drink.
“I want to lose three pounds,” Regina George says.
How funny, I think, as I walk outside of my apartment, trying not to catch glimpses of myself in car mirrors. So do I.
* * *
Girls have trouble simply hanging out. There’s always a reason for getting together, a declarative statement that ends with somebody saying, “We better just meet Friday for drinks…to DISCUSS.” We don’t just “meet for drinks” because it’s Tuesday. There’s always some terrifying underlying tone for the meet-up—perhaps your friend is passive-aggressively going to confront you for spending too much time with your boyfriend. Maybe you need to talk for six hours about your friends who aren’t there, or what kind of haircut you should get. Perhaps your friend needs to talk for three sangria carafes about how Blake, a guy who looks like he barrel-rolled straight out of his fraternity into her arms, didn’t call her this weekend (just say it: He hates her).
In this case, my friend Danielle and I decided to have one of those nights because we were sick and tired of spending hours on the Internet talking about how happy we were being single. It’s all we did, like old people love talking about how they used to be young. We were raving about it so much that we didn’t notice we had poured chocolate and hot sauce all over our pajamas and it had set in and we had become cemented to the floor. Like plants, we needed to be brought out into sunlight and watered and taken care of. We needed to leave the house to do something crazier than trying to pop a cheek pimple, and girls’ night was an excellent excuse.
“We’ll meet GUYS,” I said. Men who wear button-down shirts and work at nonprofits or sing in bands and lean on counters and never call and make you hate yourself and possibly the human race in general!
“GUYS!” she said, as we drooled all over our computer keys, trying to remember what human touch feels like.
The moment you proclaim a girls’ night out, the winds change. A glitter double rainbow, dusted with lip gloss and wedge platforms and Nicki Minaj songs, floats across the sky, and the prophecy has spoken. It doesn’t matter how much dignity you have or how single you are or aren’t. You’re about to go on the hunt. My laugh gets higher, my nails pinker, my brain considerably less academic. Goals have been set: Make an attractive person smile while you giggle. Justify your dress and the effort you took in putting it on. End the night sending odd texts to a number you didn’t have a few hours ago, making promises you won’t keep, licking late-night nacho dust off your fingers. It’s not your proudest night, but it’s certainly A NIGHT.
But this one…it wasn’t starting off on the right foot. A bad mood was settling in, the same kind of bad mood I get in whenever I am at a party and people decide to talk about sports. The pregame drinks I had didn’t make me buzzed, they just made me feel irritated and groggy, my hair looked like a fuzzy mess of hay, and I was already regretting my choice to wear heels. I watched as couples around me slowly ambled by, kissing, and I wanted to beat them with broken bottles. The shrill cries of teenagers echoed in my head like they were dog whistles that brought no adorable puppies. So help me children, I thought, if one of you accidentally bumps into me, I will end up in jail.
Danielle met me on a street corner and we stood in the cold like idiots, debating where to go. The bars in my neighborhood fit into one of these four categories: the places you used to go when you wanted to drink underage, the seedy bars you think only exist in Road House (“I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”), the places that people who don’t like club music go to and dry hump each other to indie music, and the Commodore (the best one, try the chicken). We ended up at the kind of underaged joint where the Absolut cocktails were inexplicably twelve dollars and a terrible band was inside playing songs about their bitchy ex-girlfriends. I started sucking down vodka like I had just walked through the desert, or spent the day at a Christian bible camp, or something else terrible, and then started on my mission—look for guys to awkwardly avoid eye contact with. Prospects weren’t limited, but most were terrible. There were a few attractive guys, aloof guys who wanted you to approach them, guys with girlfriends who wore peach dresses and those preppy necklaces that looked like anal beads, guys who looked like they would make the first move but would smell very bad. I waited for somebody—ANYBODY—to talk to me. With every guy who passed me for another girl, I tried to analyze what was wrong with me. It was me, right? It was my hair. It was my glasses. It was the dress. Yeah, it was definitely because I looked chubby in this dress—my go-to reasoning for when I was feeling rejected. I needed to lose those three pounds, or five, or at least wear something that didn’t hug my body so much.
After a while of yelling over the shitty music and surveying the uninterested men, Danielle and I left the bar in a huff, barely buzzed and in the kind of mood that you get in when you don’t get hit on and realize it’s one of those nights where you actually care about that. We went to bar after bar, sadly checking our phones in the hopes that somebody but our moms had texted us, trying specialty cocktails that tasted like piss, waiting for Godot. This night was a bust, we assumed, as we parked it at some faux Francophile establishment, surveying the crowd of Audrey Tautous with tattoos and guys who looked like you could convince them to buy a beret. My stomach began to grumble. Ah, yes, I was also in a bad mood because I was hungry, which is pretty much the only excuse both a baby and an adult can make. Danielle called over the bartender to ask for their late-night menu, and I let her know that I was trying to be good, didn’t want to eat something too crazy.
The bartender was the typical booze slinger you meet in Brooklyn. Coked-out, potbelly, full of energy and animal-related skin art. He was writing a book, he told me. A children’s book about deforestation (but I don’t think it was FernGully). He told us to try the grilled cheese sandwich, which had approximately thirty-six kinds of cheese and bread made entirely of butter. Plus, it came with a side salad. We waffled for a minute, scanning over the other bar food choices for something that had the words vegetable panini in it. Soon, I realized that the grilled cheese was the best option we were going to get here. For a place that was supposed to be sophisticated, they sure did like to tout their “amazin’ wings.”
“I guess,” I said. “Bring it out. We’ll share it.”
Girls love sharing their food. It makes us feel better about ourselves and more apt to order things that have a lot of cholesterol in them, even if we don’t totally understand what cholesterol is. In my head, I told myself I wouldn’t even eat all of my half. Too many calories. Think of those three pounds, Alida. I scanned the bar, looking at all of the girls who seemed impossibly thinner than I was, impossibly cooler than
I was, impossibly attractive, and I started to feel even worse than I did before.
Danielle and I waited for what seemed like an eternity, before I saw a tiny Latino man waving a plate above his head, trying to get the young crowd to move the hell away from him and let him do his job. The plate bobbed through the crowd, and people started parting for it like it was Moses or Jesus making a journey through the bar. And then, there it was: the sandwich of dreams. It looked beautiful. People stopped and stared. You know the look people give people when they see a chick come down the stairs in her prom dress? This sandwich elicited the same sort of shock and awe. Williamsburg was hungry for my sandwich, and oh, it was mine!
Now, I’ve had some sandwiches that have changed my life: any bagel sandwich after a hangover, two-dollar banh mis, and the egg and eggplant at the Clover food truck in Boston come to mind. This one, however, was a game changer. It came apart in lacy white angel strings when you pulled it, and it was crispy and grooved where it had been pressed down with butter. There were garlic pieces baked directly in with the cheese. Simply put, it looked magnificent. Danielle and I dug in, each grabbing a half. The moment we took a bite the smiling wouldn’t stop, kind of like the Jack Nicholson version of the Joker. Cheese and oil and slop were dripping down our chins, but there was no time for napkins. All we kept saying was “Oh my god. This is so good. This is so good.” The flavors danced on my tongue and happy endorphins were surging through me. This sandwich was delicious—the holy grail of grilled cheeses. I gobbled down my half, not even touching the side salad, which I had ordered, of course, with dressing on the side. I was savoring every last drip of grease and cheese, tempted to lick the plate, and I could tell Danielle felt the same. This wasn’t just a sandwich—this was a religious experience. We were purely happy in that moment, not because we were getting hit on, not because we were feeling drunk and sexy, but because of a delicious, gooey, cheesy sandwich.
A lightbulb went off in my head: Eating food—good food, like this sandwich—is fucking worth it.
There was a time in my life when I would’ve eaten every bite of that sandwich with regret, and by time, I mean most days of my life since adolescence. Food has always been a struggle for me—it is delicious, but it also makes my belly pooch out when I sit down, and to me, that was worse than getting diabetes or legitimate health concerns that make people cautious about their weight. Just like getting upset over idiotic nights out where you’re grumpy because nobody asked for your number, worrying about gaining weight was one of those stupid, small things that feels very significant when your self-esteem is shit. And I did it all the time.
It all started—of course—in the black hole otherwise known as middle school. I was a chubby kid back then, for the same reason people railed on Snooki in season one of Jersey Shore—I’m short, and so my fat had nowhere to go. People made fun of me, because middle schoolers are jerks. I was weird, I was fat, I was ugly, according to what seemed like everyone. Every day was a battle to go by unnoticed. I even ate lunch in the bathroom once—yes, that actually happens to people who are bullied in real life, not just in teen dramas. Now a lot of kids are chubby in middle school, and a lot of people get made fun of in middle school. I get that. I think it’s how people react to those years that sets them on a path. Do you let it affect you? Do you internalize it? For me, being made fun of introduced an even darker enemy than the kids who insulted me—and that enemy was myself. My body was the biggest villain in my life. The Bowser to my Mario. I didn’t want to be known as “the fat girl,” because in this world, being fat is the worst insult you could throw at a person. So I started pinching and prodding at my body in the mirror, weighing myself constantly, revolting against food—and then, poof, I started to become skinny.
By junior year of high school, all of my baby fat was gone, and I could fit into American Eagle Outfitters, size 00. Double ZERO. This really shouldn’t be a thing, because we ALL have a waist size. Sometimes it’s small, but it’s never nonexistent. But that’s what I wanted to do—to have a waist so tiny that it was almost negligible, and mostly because boys started thinking I was “pretty” and girls told me I looked really great in popped-collar polos, which is definitely a lie. I walked around with my new physique, basking in my life of having a Coach clutch, a slammin’ bod to wear mall clothes on, and a boyfriend who later dumped me because he couldn’t handle the stress of a traffic ticket, when the unthinkable happened.
I gained five pounds.
Holy shit, right? Five pounds! Let’s all hold hands and have a candlelight vigil and throw metaphorical one-hundred-calorie snacks into the ocean and sob into each other’s arms and watch eighteen-year-old me have a bit of a breakdown. Gaining these five pounds propelled me to try all sorts of EXTREME BEHAVIORS, apparently because I was a suburban half-white girl, and I needed to have some sort of eating problem or else the CW wouldn’t make a show about my life.
I didn’t do the grapefruit thing, or the chicken broth thing, or any other really exaggerated “insane diet thing,” because my parents would notice and probably would force-feed me pork chops. But I figured out what other things I could get away with, little tricks that could get me to lose those five pounds plus a few more. Making sure I never exceeded eight hundred calories a day. Running until I needed to get physical therapy for my knee. Eating rice cakes and yogurt until I became gaunt in the face. Nobody called me out on these behaviors, because dieting is normal for teenage girls. Ordering a burger is almost more disconcerting than eating low-fat frozen meals or fiber cereal.
Even at my skinniest, I still had my hips and thighs, which drove me crazy. I would scold them in the nighttime, like they were intruders in my body Cave of Wonders. We want our baaaagelllls, they used to moan in the nighttime. You’re not a model, give us our creammm cheeeseee. “Not yet!” I’d say. According to this thinspo blog I’m reading, if I eat only tubes of air and frozen grapes for another thirty-six years, I will have the photoshopped body of Adriana Lima on the cover of a woman’s magazine: THINGS PHOTOSHOP CAN DO! I refused to believe that my “body type” was the reason I had hips, it was simply my inability to eat only Lean Cuisine and Splenda all day, every day. Look at all the models on the DESIGNER CLOTHES FEED ME billboards. They can do it! And look how sexual they look! That can be me, too!
Okay, so there’s a huge difference between the high school rice cake eater (me) and the girl eating orgasmic grilled cheese (me). For one thing, I’m not nearly as apt to freak out over things as much as I did in high school, when I would have murdered somebody for turning off my television. And I also went to college and became a feminist and all that jazz, which, to me, makes the whole situation worse. I was all about women owning their body! I learned to embrace other people’s fat, telling people that they should love their body, trashing magazines that pushed abs and carb cutting and millions of other stick-thin end goals. All girl bodies were great, I told myself over and over again. Except of course, mine. Mine was pretty gross.
So that’s why sitting there with Danielle, eating a grilled cheese in my twenties was pretty significant. After years of believing that enjoying food made you aligned with the Dark Lord and the devil, I finally realized, that’s kind of stupid because food can be delicious. I didn’t have an “oh my god, I should stop fighting my body” moment that was so dramatic I cried. I didn’t riot grrrl my way into a woman’s magazine office and burn it down. I didn’t grab my tummy and point at all my fat and enjoy how it kind of sticks out over my jeans. I just remembered how much I like to eat, so I ate. And I smiled. As simple as that. But that’s pretty cool for a girl who used to add up all her breakfast and lunch calories on her Casio so she could see if she could eat more than a measured cup of veggie soup for dinner.
Here’s the thing: I like to fucking eat. I gain immense pleasure from shoving noodles into my mouth or eating gooey slices of pizza on a Tuesday evening. Sitting there with Danielle, I realized that after years of fighting my weight, there was nothing as happy and l
ovely as simply enjoying food. I love the way eating feels, not just how thin feels, okay, Kate Moss?! There are some things in life that give me happiness, happiness in a way that only a scoop of ice cream can. And if that means my ribs don’t stab everybody like an insane homeless person, so be it. I will gladly put up with a little bit of tummy and a little bit of thigh as long as I continue to get my precious, life-giving food. Because you NEED food to survive, but you don’t NEED to be stick-fucking-thin to survive. And I’m tired, very, VERY tired, of people telling me that the women on the cover of SEX: BE SEX magazines are the standard of beauty. There’s nothing sexier than a woman eating a sandwich, and that is my opinion, but I also suspect it is a fact. Whatever your body looks like while enjoying that sandwich? That’s what your body looks like. It’s the cards you’ve been given, lady. Thick or thin. Be as fat as you want, be as skinny as you want, but don’t hurt yourself over it. Sure, you can run around and do some cardio and eat some salads if you feel crappy and unhealthy, but mostly I’d just like you to be happy and order the mashed potatoes. Go ahead. Go to a restaurant and every once in a while order the goddamn mashed potatoes. It won’t kill you.
It’s not a white-girl problem to want to lose weight and be a super-skinny piece of toast. It’s a real problem that affects real girls who make themselves sick over lingerie models who somehow dictate how normal human beings are supposed to look. Fuck them, I say. Fuck anybody who calls anybody fat; fuck anybody who tells me that eating a good meal isn’t sexy and awesome, and to any girl who thinks dieting to the point of starvation is worth having pelvic bones that stick out—it’s time to grow up.