I looked up at her, ready to tell her that I hated reading and Dickens and seventh grade, but her eyes stopped me. They said it before her mouth could. “Dad’s dead.”
I ran to my room and sobbed into the clothes hanging in my closet. I hated the feeling of the fabric against my face. I wanted to tear all the clothing from its hangers. I hated my First Communion dress and how roughly the coarse white material rubbed against my wet cheek. I hated Mom for wanting me to save it, since she’d had a wedding dress cut down to fit me. I hated that since the dress was a women’s size twelve, she thought I could probably wear it again when I grew up. I knew how impossible that was—and how no one wears their First Communion dress again after second grade. I thought of how everyone just gets bigger as they grow up. And then I hated that, too.
When I search frantically through my memories of the rest of that night, I can only hear two sentences: the ones Mom said to Anthony and me in her bedroom. “Dad died last July in Arizona. He had a stroke, and they found him at the train station.”
I scan the days that followed. I remember odd bits and pieces of the time, little snippets of phone calls, my brother’s face, the hunch of my mother’s heaving back as she lay in bed facing the window the next morning. That time is like a scratched CD, the song coming in and out of lyrics and harmonies. Fragments of melody at best. The whole month of November 1997 is jagged and disjointed and holey.
But I clearly remember the food. I remember the J.J. Nissen blueberry muffins that my Nana brought that Monday morning. The way the moist muffin top sort of gelled to my fingertips. How I finished two and smashed the empty wrappers between two cupped palms on my way to the trash can. I remember the creaminess of 2% milk and the tart zing of ice-cold Newman’s Own Lemonade. I can’t remember the exact conversations, the dress I wore to his funeral, what my brother said in his eighteen-year-old’s eulogy, what I told my seventh-grade friends when they called and asked if I could do a part of some project for class on Wednesday. I can’t remember crying more than twice.
All I can think of is the gummy crumbs of a store-bought blueberry muffin. The oversize rings of oil that bled through the white parchment-paper muffin liner. Thanking my Nana and Aunt Margie for bringing us a haul of groceries.
The way I swallowed then, when I needed anything but to feel, was precarious. Desperation and regret. A sharp gulp. A jagged clump of blueberry muffin in that space between my tonsils, working its way down to rest in my belly. It’s hard to tell if it’s a knot of tears welling in my throat, or a hunk of food that has barely been chewed before being swallowed. The knot sinking lower and lower, like a tennis ball being pushed through panty hose.
I’d eat this way, hard and purposeful, all the days following his death. I found momentary relief in discomfort of another sort. In feeling as if my stomach could sate that hole where a dad, alcoholic or not, used to be. The muffins, those bloated Apple Jacks—I pushed them forcefully into my mouth with the hope that they would distract me.
But they did not.
They could not.
I ate as ragefully as I felt. I swallowed uncomfortably. I kept my head bent and hanging, to my bowl, shamefully. I filled myself desperately.
Food numbed me.
I wish I remembered his face as precisely as I remember eating the muffins, one after another, the morning after Mom told me he’d died. I wish I hadn’t found out that the reason we didn’t know where Dad was for five months, two weeks, five days, and nine hours—since I’d told him not to come home—was because he was homeless and without any form of identification on him. I wish he’d had more than two pennies in his left pocket. I wish he hadn’t been sleeping in a boxcar in the scorching desert heat, after drinking himself into oblivion. I wish they hadn’t had to identify him by his teeth, and that they hadn’t just put him in a simple pine box and misplaced his file, forgetting to call his next of kin until November.
I wish I had a better photograph in mind when I think of him now than the one the coroner sent us to verify that the body they found, homeless and alone, was, indeed, Robert F. Mitchell. I wish his eyes had been closed in that picture, or even cloudy and sweet with booze again. Anything but scared and cold and gone.
When I wanted to forget that picture of my broken father, I ate. I hung sweet and savory pictures over the ones that haunted me. I framed the food instead.
I LEARNED TWO VERY IMPORTANT THINGS in the wake of Dad’s death. One was that losing him meant I could also temporarily remove the name tag I’d worn for years that read “the fat girl” and replace it with something more compassionate: “the girl whose dad died.” Kids passing me in the hall would offer a look that said I’m sorry, and not just because I laughed when they called you a wide load on the bus last week. I’d return a silent thank-you and realize that none of it mattered anyway.
The second thing I learned was that school was the only place where I wasn’t alone. And I began to love it for that reason. I began to crave it.
The sadness I felt then, and even sometimes now, blares within me. It’s an all-encompassing, piercing sound—a fire alarm. It shrieks so loudly, I cower. I seek refuge by covering my ears. I think briefly about ducking beneath a stairwell, hoping its shrillness will be muffled if I hide from it. But it finds me, always. It finds me when I’m in the shower or walking on a treadmill; it wakes me suddenly in the night. It forces me to uncover my ears. And I hear it while trying not to listen to what it means. The pain, the sound—it’s deafening. After listening for so long, I become immune to it. The urgent alarm turns to a hollow ringing, a monotone that feels far away and permanent. And sometimes, though the dull pain in my ears reminds me, I can make myself forget I’m hearing it at all.
Eating made me forget. The flavors, the textures, and smells entertained me enough to mute my other senses. Filling my belly stuffed my mind so completely that no space existed for sadness. Packing myself with sweets until I ached created a new sensation, one that had nothing to do with intense loneliness and broken dads.
The kitchen, too, made me forget. That galley in our apartment had become the only space at home I could tolerate. The cramped quarters felt comforting. Staying in there prevented me from lingering in the vulnerability, the wide-openness of reality.
In hindsight, I see so clearly the isolation, the desperation for attention and affection of any kind that absorbed me. Mom returned to work three days after the funeral. Anthony didn’t go back to school in Arizona. He began staying out with friends all night, working, doing anything to avoid coming home. I was desperate for one of them to stay with me, to keep me from feeling as though Dad’s death was eating away at me, slowly and alone. But neither ever did. And I never asked them to.
I prayed for invitations to hang out with friends, for anything that might involve a real plated meal and a family. Our home had become the loneliest place I’d ever been, and I hated it. I hated that I was the one who had to lock the front and back doors to our apartment each night before heading to bed. I hated worrying that another tow truck might show up early in the morning to repossess our car and that maybe this time I’d be the only one home. I hated worrying that the electric company might turn off the lights again, and then I’d be left not only alone, but in darkness, too. I hated myself for wishing that Anthony felt guilty for going out, because I understood why no one would want to remain in our lifeless home. I hated the feeling of helplessness, of knowing that Mom was working to support me while I sat at home gorging myself on almost all of the only food she could afford. I hated it each time I stuffed the cardboard of a cereal box into our trash can, knowing that I’d just eaten five bowls and she’d eaten none.
But hating it didn’t change anything; it didn’t fill our home with more people, more food, or more comfort. None of us could offer each other anything substantial. Not Mom, not Anthony, not me. Instead, Mom and Anthony left, surviving by busying themselves. And I, for my part, ate.
When I’d finish eating all the sweets in our kitch
en, usually a measly three days after Mom had gone grocery shopping, I’d begin baking. I restocked our cabinets with homemade treats. Almost exclusively, I lifted recipes from the pages of the one, the only recipe book that sat on our counter: The Silver Palate Cookbook, our favorite. Mom, concerned with even the mention of clutter, wasn’t the kind to leave things out—especially things that belonged on bookcases or in cabinets. That she let that tome keep company with her KitchenAid stand mixer on the counter meant something.
Since my fifth birthday, I had been Mom’s apprentice every time she baked. I shadowed her as she beat butter and sugar into glossy gold batter for bishop’s cake. We made luscious lemon squares with tart, bright notes of citrus and a buttery shortbread base. She let me dust powdered sugar across their gooey tops. I helped by cracking eggs into the bowl and running a knife along the top of her measuring cups, letting the excess flour drop off the sides. I learned the timing. I learned the precision. I learned the delicate nature of baking. And my favorite: the requisite taste testing. There was value in licking every battered spoon and every frosting-laden finger. What, exactly, that value was, I’m not aware, but my belly knew, and I’d say that’s enough. I left most major decisions to that part of me—to the wisdom of my waist.
Having spent years at Mom’s side, asking questions, watching cupcakes dome through the oven door, I learned to read almost exclusively by recipe cards. They served as flash cards, lined up neatly in the pattern of the alphabet. Apple Pie, Banana Bread, Carrot Cake … And somehow, without consciously realizing the transition, I became the baker. I sat there in our kitchen—now thirteen and unsure if it was hunger or just loneliness that brought me there—and recreated the confections we once made together. The ones that drew me, nose first, into the kitchen tied themselves to moments in my life and tucked themselves away in the closet of my memory.
Double fudge brownies as fat and dense as bricks, coconut white-chocolate blondies, cashmere custards so thick they’d remain stuck to a spoon held upside down, spicy molasses cookies, and all things that conjured lust. As I yanked each of them from the oven’s mouth, never quite making a clean getaway without some form of heat blister, I felt full. Our apartment wasn’t so lonely with two dozen cupcakes cooling on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t so quiet when the timer dinged and the mixer churned. There was less to notice when my hands were knuckle-deep in kneading dough.
And when I wasn’t baking, when I wasn’t all alone in my own kitchen, Mom drove me to Boston to stay with her sister Maureen; Maureen’s husband, Mike; and their kids, Michael, Matt, and Meredith. I spent weekends, summer breaks, vacations, and holidays with them when Mom had to work. If only I’d had an M name, I might have forgotten that I wasn’t one of them. Maureen and Mike treated me no differently than their own children; my cousins—all around my age—accepted me as a sister. I experienced a kind of nurturing—a sense of structure and normalcy—that I hadn’t known before. I was happy there. I was a kid there. But sometimes, in quiet moments when I’d turn the corner into their kitchen to see Mike tinkering with a school project for Michael, or when I’d take notice of Matt’s report card hung proudly on the fridge, or when I’d watch Maureen French-braid Meredith’s hair for her dance recital, I’d be jolted back to the reality that this perfect family was not truly mine. At my house, no one was there to help me with projects, no one knew if I brought my report card home or not, and even if Mom could braid my hair, it would be unlikely that she’d be able to make it to my recital. When Mom would come to pick me up, even though I’d have missed her terribly, I’d stare out the car window as we’d drive away, back toward Maureen’s big, beautiful yellow house and wish that I could stay.
Back in Medfield, I found other surrogate families—those of my best friends, Kate and Nicole. Nicole’s dad, Paul, was the one to drive me home most school nights after he’d cooked dinner for all of us. I always felt a pang of guilt, no matter how many times he reassured me that it was no trouble at all shuttling me back to my apartment, because I knew it couldn’t have been easy to juggle all that he did. On top of being a volunteer firefighter, he also worked a full-time rotating shift—nights and days—as a gas control operator. I hadn’t known many men to work so tirelessly. I hadn’t known even one, in fact, who not only went to work at multiple jobs but also helped to clean the house, cooked dinner, and would still be present for every Youth Soccer game his three daughters had. The seasons that I played in that soccer league, Mom only made it to one game. But Paul was there, on the sidelines at every game, running down the field and cheering for me as I dribbled the ball—just as he did for Nicole.
Perhaps because of the baking, perhaps because of Paul’s unbelievable spaghetti and meatballs, surely because of the way I ate, I gained twenty-five pounds during seventh grade, bringing me to two hundred pounds total. And though I had only ever grown outward, Mom hadn’t made me aware that she noticed. In fact, Mom was the only one, other than Anthony, who never acknowledged my size. I look back in amazement that Anthony had never once hurled the word fat at me as an insult the way my classmates had. Not many people in my family did, except Dad’s mom, Nana. She was the one who had been microwaving Lean Cuisines for me all the years I could remember.
Each summer, when Anthony and I stayed with her and Papa in South Carolina for the month of August, Nana made sure to stock up on food for our stay. On her counter sat a box of twelve sticky cinnamon-pecan buns glazed so thickly with white frosting, you could barely see their coiled centers—and they were all for Anthony. Next to them, for me, sat a package of sugar-free, fat-free Jell-O pudding cups—and not even the ones with the vanilla in the middle. The freezer, too, was split between Anthony’s food and mine. He had the Klondike bars, I had the Lean Cuisines, and we all had the tray of lasagna that she’d made a decade before, give or take a year. In the mornings, Nana suggested I sprinkle Equal on my Rice Krispies so that I could “keep my sugar down,” just like she did, to manage her diabetes. Still concerned, she sat me down one afternoon to tell me that she was disturbed by how many bananas I’d eaten. I hadn’t even realized one could eat too many bananas, let alone be concerned about it. I looked at Nana and nodded, ashamed of my fruit consumption. But as she started to get up, I noticed the trouble. She was stuck within the arms of the chair. At five feet two inches tall, Nana weighed well over three hundred pounds. Her belly—like Dad’s—preceded her. Perhaps she didn’t want me to end up as she had. Perhaps she thought she could fix me. But all I gathered from her actions and suggestions was that fat people should eat diet food, while skinny people could eat delicious food.
Mom wasn’t like that. She never even brought a scale into our home. For better or worse, she let numbers and measurements live in doctors’ offices and in the mall beside the bathroom where people could pay twenty-five cents for an unpleasant reality check.
Instead, she rubbed my back when people in school began to tease me more. When I came home and cried after being humiliated in homeroom, she supported me rather than suggested I change. My weight was something that we both wished were different, but neither of us spoke of it as something fixable. We treated my fat in the same way we treated New England winters: wishing they weren’t so burdensome, but accepting that they probably wouldn’t change anytime soon.
It wasn’t until my annual physical in eighth grade, just after I turned fourteen, that Mom and I began to think differently about my weight. We sat in the doctor’s office, just as we’d done year after year, waiting for my doctor to comment on how big I was before letting us go. This time, though, he breathed deeply and then held my growth chart in front of him for us to see. I looked at the graph, marveling at the line that rose steadily upward and to the right, from 1985 until that day in 1999. He traced a finger along the line, explaining that my weight since birth had increased rapidly, and that the rate at which I was still gaining was alarming, to say the least. He paused. “Andrea, my girl, you’ve got to lose weight.” What he said next has always stuck with me
: “At this rate, I predict you’ll weigh three hundred pounds by the time you turn twenty-five.” As if in sync, my stomach and jaw dropped. My heart stopped beating for a solid ten seconds. Mom reached over to hold my hand. I was horrified. So horrified that big fat tears came rolling down my cheeks as he rattled off a list of suggestions to help me lose weight. “Eat more fruit, try whole wheat bread, don’t eat cookies …” I stopped listening after the one about joining a sports team for exercise, too scared to even feign interest.
To say I was overwhelmed in that moment would be as much of an understatement as saying I was a little pudgy. When my doctor left and closed the door behind him, Mom grabbed my face in her hands, looked into my saltwatery eyes, and assured me: “Francie, now you listen to me. You’re the most beautiful being I’ve ever laid eyes upon.” And though every mother might spout the same sentiments, I knew mine wanted nothing as much as she wanted me to believe her words.
We left the office, and I cried all the way to lunch at Pizzeria Uno, where we sat in a leather booth built for two and talked earnestly for the first time about losing weight. I felt vulnerable acknowledging with Mom how big I’d gotten, when weight had always kept a quiet and immutable existence. I didn’t say it aloud, but I recognized the oddity of talking about eating healthier while swigging a Sprite, just one of the many things the doctor suggested that I eliminate from my diet. I picked french fries from my platter of chicken fingers and brought them to my mouth quickly, compulsively, as though clearing my plate were the first order of business in making room for change. I finished my meal and even helped with some of Mom’s, and what I was left with was an odd tug-of-war between hating and pitying myself. I could feel the fat clinging tightly to me as it always had, and now, at the very thought of having to rid myself of it, I felt it cling tighter. At fourteen and two hundred pounds, I couldn’t help but feel burdened by my weight. Worse, I was saddled with the fact that I was the one who had to actively lose it.
It Was Me All Along Page 5