Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?: True Stories and Confessions

by Lisa Scottoline

  Another interesting conflation of time and space.

  Another paradox.

  Mother Mary was feisty, strong, and always ready to crack wise. She was a survivor of an impoverished childhood, the youngest of nineteen children. I won’t repeat the many stories about her herein, but because her personality was so much larger than her four-foot-eleven frame and her influence so pervasive, I would’ve expected her passing to leave a massive hole in my life, like a vacuum in space into which things disappeared, a void like a bottomless loss.

  But that hasn’t happened at all.

  Which is good for me and probably for the universe as a whole, because it sounded so scary.

  I’m experiencing the loss of her, but the way I experienced the loss of my father. I’m not stricken, like a blow that leaves me reeling with the force of its impact, but it’s more like a fact of life—that runs alongside the fact of death.

  She’s with me all the time even though she isn’t.

  I don’t talk to her in my head, like other people do, but I hear her voice in my head and I know what she would say in any given situation.

  Probably, so do you.

  And if you have your mother plus Mother Mary in your head, I wish you luck.

  People always joke that daughters become their mothers, and in my case, become their fathers too, and I think all of us embody the best of our parents.

  And if we’re trying to live our lives the best way possible, we’re keeping what we loved about them and deleting the rest, like when a sure-handed editor goes over the first draft of the manuscript. The edited story morphs and changes, but the first draft—our mothers and our fathers—remain in the story, present behind the sentences themselves, and that essence abides always, never really going away.

  And so we are, each of us, a book.

  But no one of us is truly finished. We’re constantly rewriting ourselves, and the possibilities are limitless. We never know where our own narrative will lead, or which plot twist will come out which way.

  It’s not The End.

  We’re not in final draft, not while we draw breath.

  So breathe in.

  And keep writing.

  Carbs of Peace

  By Francesca

  It’s commonly held wisdom that one healthy choice leads to another. So it seemed fitting that I discovered a health food store on the way home from my new gym.

  The store is called Health & Harmony, and as soon as I passed through its doors, I knew I had entered the rabbit hole of rabbit food.

  Rows upon rows of products I’d never seen before in brightly colored packaging with words I’d never read.

  Chia, and kombucha, and flax, oh my!

  I was dazzled. I’ve always been an adventurous eater, but since I started my new and improved diet in the spring, the result has been a rather repetitive rotation of lean meals.

  This was like Willy Wonka’s factory with no high-fructose corn syrup.

  When I call this a health food store, I don’t mean a box of Kashi cereal. Kashi is for amateurs. This was some next-level, Goop.com kind of stuff.

  The dairy aisle, for example, isn’t hemmed in by the confines of a cow. There’s almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk, Tofutti cream cheese, anything but milk from a mammal.

  Think outside the teat.

  And forget that Greek yogurt that John Stamos sells. Health & Harmony is immune to Uncle Jesse’s charms. Here, they sell Siggi’s Icelandic-style Skyr.

  Don’t be scared, or skyrred. Skyr is just Icelandic for yogurt.

  And it’s delicious. They have the most unusual flavors, like Coconut, Orange & Ginger, and Pumpkin Spice, so of course I had to try them all.

  Gluten is enemy number one at this store. Every pretzel, cracker, and cookie says GLUTEN FREE across the front. Even things that obviously wouldn’t have gluten, like cheese, peanut butter, or edamame, proudly display their gluten prejudice.

  But what if I want gluten? Or not so much that I want it, but I’m afraid of what they’re substituting it with.

  Remember when we all hopped on the nonfat bandwagon before we realized that meant replacing fat with enough sugar to send you into glycemic shock?

  Or when we fell for sugar-free without realizing that meant carcinogenic-aspartame-full?

  Better the devil you know …

  So I stick with the unusual but still pure foods. Most of the time. I confess, I was intrigued by a bag of white noodles floating in water called Shirataki noodles. They look like spaghetti, but they are mysteriously calorie-free.

  My foggy memory of chemistry class says that a calorie is a unit of heat energy, so if this food has no calories, does that mean you can’t kill it with fire?

  It is the devil’s noodle.

  But carb-free pasta, are you kidding? Mephistopheles, where do I sign?

  (Holy sh-t, guys, I just Wikipedia’d Shirataki noodles, because I am a serious author who does serious research, and it, for real, said that another name is “Devil’s Tongue Noodles.” I was just joking before! Now I’m scared.)

  The Devil’s Noodle

  Also, it seems every food at this store has live active cultures in it. Apparently, bacteria in your food is a good thing.

  I knew the five-second rule was real.

  For instance, there’s an entire section of sauerkrauts, because pickled is in this season. On a whim, I plucked the Spicy Wakame Ginger Kimchi off the shelf. The back of the bag had a list of rhetorical questions:

  “Do you know that raw, fermented foods are alive?”

  No, I thought I was eating vegetarian.

  “Fresh kraut is full of living, healthful micro-organisms that need room to grow.”

  Do I need to save for their college?

  “The nifty valve at the top of this pouch allows the Kraut to breathe.”

  Concerning.

  But I bought the wacky ginger kimchi anyway, and you know what? Those living, breathing organisms taste great with mayonnaise!

  Well, a store clerk convinced me to switch to Vegenaise (diary-free, egg-free, GLUTEN-free), but it tastes the same, almost.

  When I cracked down on my diet, I pretty much eliminated all my favorite snacks. I was rarely consuming them for nutritional value and mostly eating them to solve problems such as: “I’m bored,” “I have to work to earn money,” “This isn’t that good an episode,” and “Why isn’t he texting me back?”

  But Health & Harmony sells all manner of guilt-free snacks. My favorite are the Cassava Root Chips. They look like potato chips, but they’re made of a tough, fibrous root.

  And if I don’t already have you at “tough, fibrous root,” they also have 40 percent less fat than a regular potato chip.

  I had never heard of cassava, but I read on the back, “The Cassava tree grows all over Asia, South America, and Africa. Cassava root is the primary energy source for 800 million people all over the planet!”

  I paused to consider that 800 million people are forced to have a diet primarily fueled by a tree root. And I don’t think they do it to watch their figure.

  But, if you don’t mind the side of privilege-awareness, this is a great snack.

  And the bag said the chips are Certified Rain Forest Alliance. So at least I wasn’t ripping cassava root out of the hands of indigenous peoples.

  Speaking of certifications, all the store’s products appear very well educated. I realized this with the only snack I tried and hated, the Kale + Chia Chips. I generally love kale, and I don’t really understand what chia is, but combined, they tasted like tortilla chips made of peat moss. However, I couldn’t knock its pedigree:

  Certified Kosher, Certified Gluten Free, Certified Vegan, and Certified MSG and Trans-fat Free.

  The chips have more meaningless degrees than James Franco.

  But perhaps my favorite food discovered at Health & Harmony is Peace Cereal, specifically in the Baobab Coconut flavor.

  What is a baobab, you ask? I’d only previously encountered t
he word in The Little Prince, but I remember when studying that book in French class, the baobab trees are a) parasitic “bad seeds” that will destroy planets with their roots, and b) possibly an allegory for the Nazis.

  But they also taste amazing with coconut!

  What do they taste like? Between you and me, I would say the flakes taste like a Joy sugar cone.

  But don’t tell the clerk I said so.

  All I know for sure is that I can go through a box a week.

  Before, I had completely cut out cereals because I thought they had too much sugar, but this is a cereal I can feel good about! It says right on the box:

  “A contribution will be made to non-profit causes for every Peace cereal product sold.”

  Eager to justify eating fistfuls of cereal in front of a Say Yes to the Dress marathon, I went to the website for more details.

  I think I was the first person to do so, since the charities on their site haven’t been updated since 2012. But they support national parks, breast and ovarian cancer research, and a New Hampshire animal rescue devoted to disabled animals.

  Do you want to tell Misty, the one-eyed, arthritic Labrador, that you can’t help her find her food bowl, because you’re cutting carbs?

  I didn’t either.

  So every time I came home from the gym, I’d stop at Health & Harmony and pick up new, unusual foods to try, feeling like a pirate sailing home with exotic treasure.

  But you know what happened? All that booty went right to my ass.

  I realized my health food store is making me fat.

  That’s what happens if you sell your soul for a diet.

  Thru Flu

  By Lisa

  I can’t always tell the truth from the bull.

  And this is nowhere more apparent than when it comes to flu shots.

  Also my marital history, but that’s a subject for another day.

  I don’t know whether to get a flu shot, and for some reason, flu shots are having a moment.

  I say this because I went to the doctor to see about my ear infection, and before the receptionist even checked me in, she asked, “Do you want a flu shot?”

  “Um, I don’t think so,” I answered, surprised. “Should I get one?”

  “We recommend it. I can have the nurse give you one right now, while you wait to see the doctor.”

  I hesitated. “Well, I have a fever, so maybe this isn’t the best time for a flu shot.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe I’ll ask the doctor and see what he thinks.”

  “Okay.” The receptionist shrugged.

  I admit, I was just using the fever thing for an excuse. Because I know this isn’t scientific, but something about a vaccine scares me.

  Let me repeat. I know this is completely unscientific.

  Don’t write me an angry email, and please, for God’s sake, don’t take any medical advice from me.

  I’m just speaking for the great unwashed when I say it seems counterintuitive to me that in order to protect me from something I might not get, you have to give it to me for sure.

  I know, as an intellectual matter, that I didn’t get smallpox because I was given a vaccination God-knows-when, and also that I didn’t have polio because they gave us the vaccine in a sugar cube.

  Back then, I was a kid and I couldn’t say no—to things that were good for me.

  But now I’m making up for lost time.

  Please note that nobody at the doctor’s office asked me if I wanted my flu shot in a sugar cube.

  Or in you-know-what.

  (Chocolate cake.)

  They might have gotten a different answer.

  You can catch more flies with honey than you can with needles.

  And I guess my other issue, also completely irrational, is that I don’t want to live my life being afraid of all the bad things that can happen and protecting myself against them.

  If I get the flu, I’ll get the flu.

  I’ll feel crappy for a while, then it will go away.

  In any event, I’ve never had a flu shot.

  And I haven’t had the flu, in recent memory.

  For me, flu shots have gone into the category of insurance, which is something that I pay for to ward off some horrible thing that will happen, except that when the horrible thing happens, I end up paying for it anyway.

  In fact, this happened to me just last week, when they told me at my physical therapist’s office that my deductible was so high, it would be cheaper for me to pay for the physical therapy sessions out of pocket instead of going through my health insurance.

  So now I have become my car, and when I crash, I’m paying my own way.

  At the same time that I’m paying my car insurer.

  And my heath insurer.

  Anyway, what happened when I saw the doctor was that we got so engrossed talking about the ear infection that I forgot to ask him about whether I should get a flu shot, so when I went to the desk to check out, it was the cashier’s turn to ask me: “Before you leave, would you like a flu shot?”

  But I still wasn’t sure. “I forgot to ask the doctor, so let’s forget it.”

  The cashier blinked. “But we recommend it. I can have the nurse do it.”

  “Thank you, but no.” I reached in my wallet for my co-pay, which is when I began to wonder if it wasn’t the flu shot that was having a moment, but me.

  Many moments, in fact.

  Because I was probably at that age where medical professionals start asking you if you need a flu shot.

  But they’re too tactful to say, “Hey old lady, shouldn’t you be thinking about your mortality? One flu and you could fly away, if you get my drift.”

  Message received.

  And this old lady reserves the right to be contrary.

  No flu shot.

  Until good sense prevails.

  Tread Lightly

  By Lisa

  I’m about to make the smartest purchase of my life, or the dumbest.

  Before I tell you what it is, let me tell you why I’m doing it, because that’s even dumber, or smarter, depending on how the story ends.

  I first saw one of these contraptions last year, when I happened to be doing research online.

  Okay, I admit, I was wasting time online.

  Which might be redundant.

  Yesterday, I happened to be wasting time online again and I kept noticing sidebar ads popping up, which as we all know now, are based on the things tracking our online behavior. They call the things that do this cookies, but if you ask me, it’s the one kind of cookie I don’t like.

  In other words, chocolate chips taste better than computer chips.

  Anyway, the cookies in your computer send you ads about the products you’ve looked at in the past, and if you’re like me, you forget you’ve been looking at these products, so when the ads pop up and offer you these products, you get the eerie sensation that your computer is reading your mind.

  When it’s just that your computer has a better memory than you do.

  To come to my point, a long time ago, I was kind of curious about treadmill desks, because it seemed like such a crazy thing to me. If you don’t know what a treadmill desk is, it’s a special treadmill that only goes two to four miles an hour, or walking at a slow pace, and it’s outfitted with a desktop that is eyeball height, so that you can work on your computer at the same time that you’re standing up and walking on the treadmill.

  Ridiculous, right?

  I thought it was, too.

  So ridiculous, in fact, that I was actually going to write about how ridiculous it was that people have to be working so hard and multitasking like crazy, so that they can’t even take time from work to take a walk, for God’s sake.

  And of course the very notion of working while on a treadmill is too good a metaphor for a writer to pass up.

  The only thing better would be a rat in a race.

  The rat race, get it?

 
; Does anybody still even know that expression?

  Okay, so to get back to the story, there I was online and all of these ads kept popping up for treadmill desks, and since then I’ve started having back problems from sitting so much for work. In fact, the physical therapist told me my back would benefit if I switched to a standing desk.

  I need a desk for my discs!

  But I’m never one to leave well enough alone.

  Why get a standing desk when you can have a walking desk?

  I mean, why should your desk just get to sit there, doing nothing?

  So I clicked on the ad for the treadmill desk.

  And I started reading.

  All of a sudden, it started not to seem so ridiculous anymore.

  In fact, the company that makes the desks says that it makes fitness-at-work products that “target the 55+ health-conscious consumer.”

  I instantly thought, ME!

  So I spent some time on the website, watching the sales video of the people happily typing away on their computers while they were walking on treadmills.

  And I wanted to be one of them.

  The only hard part is that I’m not sure I have that degree of coordination.

  You have to be able to pat your head, chew gum, and write a novel, all at the same time.

  Normally I can only do one of these at once.

  Chew gum.

  So I researched the customer reviews of the treadmill desks, and the idea started to grow on me. So the moral of the story is that sometimes things that look ridiculous might turn into a necessity, which is a moral I forgot when I saw elsewhere on the website that they actually sold desks attached to bicycles.

  A cycling desk?

  Now that’s ridiculous.

  I think.

  Hot Wheels

  By Francesca

  I’m not much of a driver. So imagine my surprise when I found myself behind the wheel of a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S.

  But there I was, driving it at 70 mph an hour with the wind in my hair and four hundred horsepower in front of me.

  Or is it behind me? Where’s the engine on a Porsche, again? Sorry, I’m really not a car person.

  Let me shift this story into reverse. Recently, I went to visit my best friend and her fiancé at their beach rental in Rhode Island. The first day there, my friend and I spent the morning on the beach while her fiancé worked at the house. When we got hungry, she said there was a great little seafood shack just a short drive away.