Big Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  * * *

  The Lathrop School paid well, but not so well that my parents didn’t need to look for summer jobs. The year that I was six, they’d both gotten hired at an overnight camp in Maine. My dad would be the aquatics director, teaching kids how to kayak and canoe. (“Do you know how to kayak and canoe?” I’d asked, and my father, who’d grown up in Brooklyn, had smiled and said, “I’ll learn.”) While he was on the water, Mom would run the arts and crafts program. They’d get room and board, a private cabin, and generous salaries. The only problem was, I wasn’t old enough to attend as a camper, or to be left in their cabin by myself. So they invited my mother’s mother to come down from Connecticut and stay with me in New York.

  “Daphne and I will have a wonderful time!” Nana had said. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell my parents that Nana scared me. Where my mom and my Bubbe, my father’s mother, were soft and warm and smelled good, Nana was sharp-edged and skinny, and had stale coffee breath and none of my mother’s gentle ways or affinity for baked goods. Her gray hair was clipped short, and her eyes, magnified by her reading glasses, looked like a pair of poached eggs. My mom wore brightly colored, loose-fitting clothes: blousy tops, long skirts with hems that draped the floor, or smocks with pockets full of tape and buttons, bits of trim, a pair of earrings and her house keys, pennies and butterscotch candies. Bubbe carried a giant New Yorker tote bag, with a rattling keychain and her phone and its charger and whatever library book she was reading, a backup library book in case she finished that one, and a squashed peanut-butter-and-apricot-jam sandwich, in case she or I got hungry. Nana wore spotless white blouses and crisply pressed black pants with no pockets. She carried a small, immaculate purse.

  Before Nana arrived, my mother sat down with me on my bed. “Nana loves you,” she began. “You know that, right?”

  I nodded, thinking that if someone really loved you, you didn’t need to be told. Nana sent me presents for Chanukah and my birthday, and kissed my cheek and hugged me hello when she saw me and goodbye when she left, but the hugs and the gifts felt like acts of obligation. I didn’t think I was the kind of granddaughter Nana had hoped for, a small, neat, pretty girl to take to The Nutcracker or for tea at the Plaza. That summer, my hair hung halfway to my waist and was frequently tangled. I had scabby elbows and skinned knees, and I was tall for my age, and round, like my parents. Nana didn’t seem to actually enjoy having me around, the way Bubbe did, when we’d visit her in Arizona or she’d come for the holidays. Bubbe kept a special stepstool in her kitchen just for me to use when I was there, and she let me sleep in her big bed at night.

  My mother had pulled me against her. “If you miss us… or if Nana does something that makes you feel bad…”

  I kept quiet, watching as my mom pulled a pink square of paper out of her pocket and used a thumbtack to affix it to the center of the corkboard over my desk, a board normally filled with my paintings and drawings. “This is our number,” she said. Her voice had softened, and she sounded more like herself. “We’ll call you every night. But you can call us if you need us. Anytime. No matter what.”

  The next morning, Nana arrived, pulling a black suitcase and wearing a pair of gold knot-shaped earrings and a bracelet of gold links around her wrist. Her fingernails were freshly manicured, salmon-pink ovals that were pointy at the top. “Daphne!” she said, forming a smile shape with her mouth. Nana hugged me and kept one arm tight around me as, with the other, she waved my parents out the door. “Don’t worry about a thing. Daphne and I are going to have a wonderful time!” I stood at the window, watching as my parents piled their duffel bags and a tote bag filled with all of the New Yorkers my dad planned to read into the trunk of the car. My father slammed the trunk. My mother blew one last kiss. Then they pulled away from the curb and made their way up Riverside Drive toward the Henry Hudson Parkway. I could see my mom’s hand sticking out of the window, waving at me, until they turned a corner and were out of sight. And then Nana and I were alone.

  Nana looked me over. Her voice was bright, but her body was stiff. “We’re going to make some changes here,” she said, and bent down to the cupboard beneath the sink, pulling out a trash bag. As I watched, she opened the refrigerator and tossed into the bag a loaf of white bread, a container of sour cream, three sticks of butter, and the Tupperware container half-full of chocolate-chip cookie dough (sometimes, my mother would bake two cookies for each of us after dinner, and other times she’d allow me to have a spoonful of dough for dessert). The remainder of a half-gallon of orange juice went down the drain, followed by the half-and-half.

  “Juice is nothing but sugar. And white food is bad food,” Nana said. “It’s basically poison.” Poison? I thought. My parents wouldn’t give me poison! But I kept quiet as Nana ransacked the pantry, dumping out the canisters of sugar and flour, the box of shortbread cookies, the cereal I liked to eat in the morning and the wheat crackers I had with cheese and an apple in the afternoon. “Processed carbohydrates,” she explained, waving the box in an accusatory way.

  “Those are bad?”

  Nana confirmed that they were, and said more things about hydrogenated fats and added sugar. Finally, she rummaged around in my mother’s desk until, with a muttered “A-ha!,” she found the stashed Toblerone and Cadbury bars that my mom would share with me sometimes at night while we watched TV. Into the trash they went.

  For the next half hour, Nana bustled through the apartment, opening every drawer and cupboard, humming tunelessly as she threw things away. I thought about trying to rescue one of the chocolate bars, but even as I thought it, Nana was twirling the ends of the bag and tying them into a knot.

  “You and I are going to eat healthy while your parents are gone,” she said. “Just wait until they see you when they get back! They’ll be so happy.” That was the first time I’d heard that there was something wrong with how I looked; the first inkling that my body was disappointing or somehow problematic. I knew that I was bigger than other kids, but until then I’d never realized that “big” was a bad thing to be.

  For dinner that night, Nana prepared broiled salmon with lemon juice squeezed on top, with broccoli on the side. When my father made salmon he marinated it in soy sauce and garlic and a little maple syrup, and when my parents gave me broccoli they served it with a saucer of ranch dressing, but the ranch dressing, I knew, had been dumped down the sink, along with the maple syrup, and this salmon was unpleasantly fishy, dry on top and slimy inside. I poked at my food and moved it around my plate, hoping that Nana would take the hint that I was still hungry. Instead, she looked at me with approval. “Only eat until you’re full, and then stop eating!” she said. “The most important exercise for weight loss is the push-away. Want to see it?”

  I didn’t. I wanted to cry and then have a dish full of ice cream. But Nana was looking at me expectantly, so I nodded. Nana set her hands on the edge of the table, pushed herself back, and stood up. “Get it? You push away from the table!”

  My heart sank.

  “And now, let’s have dessert!” Nana said. For a minute, I felt hopeful. Maybe we’d walk downstairs and sit on the stoop and wait for the ice-cream truck’s jingle. Maybe Nana had thrown away the packaged shortbread cookies because she didn’t like store-bought things. Maybe Nana was going to bake, like Bubbe did!

  Instead, Nana reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny foil square of chocolate. “Let it melt on your tongue. Savor it,” she instructed, but I gobbled my square in one bite and looked at the clock. It was just after seven. My stomach growled. Nana narrowed her eyes, like I’d made the noise on purpose.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said. And so out we went. We walked over to Broadway and followed it uptown, past the Chinese grocery store and the Korean chicken-wing place, past the ramen restaurant and the ice-cream parlor. Nana didn’t stop, or even glance at these places. She set a brisk pace, arms pumping, moving so quickly that there was barely time to look around. Every block or so she’d glance dow
n at her watch, until finally she said, “There! That’s forty-five minutes!”

  Back in the apartment, while Nana took a shower, I scoured the pantry and every shelf of the refrigerator, but I couldn’t find a single thing that would taste good. There was whole-wheat bread that I could toast, but I only liked toast with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top, or with apricot jam and butter, and Nana had gotten rid of all those things except cinnamon, which was no good on its own.

  When my parents called, I told them that I loved them and that everything was fine.

  I went to bed with my belly aching from hunger and loneliness. When I woke up the next morning, I could smell coffee coming from the kitchen, a good, familiar smell. Maybe it was a bad dream, I thought, and when I heard Nana call “Breakfast time!” I jumped out of bed, used the bathroom, washed up, and raced to the table, where I found a poached egg, a single slice of dry toast, an orange, and a large glass of water. I inhaled the egg, the orange, and most of the toast while Nana took her time, sipping and nibbling, setting her slice of toast down between bites and giving me meaningful looks until, with my remaining crust, I did the same, before going to my room to paint.

  For lunch, we ate tuna fish, mixed with lemon juice instead of mayonnaise, and celery chopped fine, served with lettuce and another slice of toast. After lunch, Nana hustled me to the bus stop, and we rode uptown and walked to the pool at Riverbank Park. Nana’s spine seemed to stiffen at the sight of the kids playing in the sprinklers. We could hear English and Spanish and languages I didn’t recognize. I saw her elbow clamp down tight against her purse and tote bag. But maybe that was just to keep me from even thinking about asking for money when we walked by the snack bar near the roller-skating rink, and I could smell French fries. When we reached the pool, Nana stood by the chain-link fence as I pulled off my shirt and shorts. “Swim laps,” she suggested. I couldn’t find the nerve to tell her that what I normally did at the pool was play Marco Polo with other kids, or swoop down toward the bottom of the deep end and then back up, pretending I was a mermaid. On the way back to the bus, she said, “I brought you a snack!” This time, I didn’t even let myself get hopeful, so I wasn’t disappointed when she gave me twelve almonds in a plastic bag and a plum. Dinner was the same as the night before, only with a chicken breast instead of salmon and, instead of the chocolate square, two dusty brown oval-shaped SnackWell’s cookies for dessert. They had a chalky texture and were so sweet that I could feel my face pucker. “See? Zero grams of fat,” said Nana, tapping the box with her fingernail. I’d left a bite of chicken and two broccoli trees on my plate, at Nana’s instructions. “Always leave food on your plate,” Nana said.

  “Why?”

  “To show that the food doesn’t have power over you. That you’re in charge, not your appetite.”

  I’d never thought of my appetite as something separate from me, something that needed to be tamed. “How do I be in charge?” I asked.

  Nana led me through a push-away and smiled the way she did everything else: thinly. Her lips pressed into an almost invisible line. “Get used to being hungry,” she said. “It won’t kill you, I promise.” She smoothed her pants against her narrow hips. “If you feel hungry, that means you’re winning.”

  That night, when I went to bed with my belly a small, aching ball, I told myself, That means I’m winning. It wasn’t much comfort. On the nights that followed, I would lie under the quilt my mother had made me, imagining the foods I’d once enjoyed: My father’s pancakes, fresh out of the pan, dolloped with butter and crisscrossed with syrup. A hot dog from Sabrett’s that would snap when I bit it and fill my mouth with savory, garlicky juice. Carrot cake studded with walnuts and raisins, topped with dense cream-cheese frosting, or the apple crisp my mom would bake after she and my dad took me apple-picking in October at an orchard in New Jersey.

  For five days, I endured spartan meals, doll-size portions, the swimming and the walking and the push-aways. On Saturday morning, Nana and I took the bus uptown, to what turned out to be a Weight Watchers meeting being held in a church basement. “I’m a lifetime member,” Nana told me proudly, handing a white envelope-size folder to a woman behind a desk and holding her head high as she stepped into a curtained cubicle and onto the scale. We found seats on folding metal chairs, and I looked around. The room was full of women, maybe fifty or sixty of them, with three men. Some of the women were white, some were black, and some were brown. Some were just a little heavy, and some were so big that they had to perch awkwardly on the chairs, which creaked and teetered underneath them, and some didn’t look heavy at all, which gave me the worst feeling, as I wondered if even thin women still struggled with their appetites, and had to come to a place like this to get help.

  The woman next to me gave me a whispered “Sorry,” as she readjusted herself on her seat. I wondered why whoever was in charge hadn’t gotten larger, more comfortable chairs, or at least spaced them out a little instead of cramming them up against one another. Then I thought that maybe the discomfort and the shame were the point, and that the women were meant to be embarrassed, and that their embarrassment would keep them from eating. The woman next to me was black, with medium-brown skin and shoulder-length braids, and the two women behind us were murmuring quietly in Spanish. Even though Nana didn’t seem comfortable around people who weren’t white when she encountered them at the pool or in our neighborhood, she seemed perfectly at ease here

  The meeting leader was an older black woman named Valerie, with freckled, reddish skin and short, curly hair that was longer on one side of her head than the other (after a few weeks of regular attendance, I heard Nana whispering to another member about Valerie’s wig, which was when I realized that those curls weren’t her own). Valerie’s eyebrows were skinny, plucked arches, her body was tall and lean and long-waisted. She had a long, scrawny neck with a soft wobble of a chin underneath it, the only part of her that was still fleshy and soft. Valerie’s voice was a marvel. It could go from a soft whisper to a confiding murmur to an exhorting shout, and hold the crowd spellbound, bringing them to silence with just a whisper. She reminded me of the Reverend C. L. Franklin, whom I’d heard on my parents’ Aretha Franklin CDs. She spoke in the same kind of preacherly cadences, encouraging the weak, congratulating the strong, welcoming backsliders back into the fold, and celebrating with the women who’d hit their goal weights.

  Valerie would begin each meeting by showing a poster-size picture of herself. In a blue satin dress with her hair in a short, black bob and bright red lipstick on her lips, she didn’t even look like the same person. Her breasts and belly bulged, her hips were so wide they seemed to strain the seams of her dress. She had a wide smile on her face, a paper plate of food in her hands. There was only Valerie in the picture, but, if you looked closely, you could see a man’s arm at the edge of the frame. Sometimes, I would let my mind wander while Valerie talked, and wonder if the hand belonged to a father or a brother or a husband or a boyfriend, someone who’d loved Valerie when she’d been that big.

  “That was me,” she would begin, her voice serious and quiet. “Oh yes! Oh yes it was!” she’d say, as if someone had voiced their doubt out loud. “I was twenty-six years old.” Her voice would get louder and louder as she went through her litany. “I weighed three hundred pounds. I was morbidly obese. Borderline diabetic. I had sleep apnea. I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without needing to catch my breath.” By then, women would be nodding along with her, all of them listening raptly, even the ones who’d heard the very same litany the week before and the week before that. Valerie would lower her voice. “I’d tried it all. Grapefruit. Cabbage soup. Slim-Fast. Did I call 1-800-Jenny? You know that I did. And then…” She would pause, hand uplifted, looking over the room, making eye contact with different members. “Then I found this program. And this program…” Another pause. Valerie would put her hand on her heart and say, “This program gave me back my life.”

  I’d never been to church, but I imagined
that church was probably something like Weight Watchers, with rituals and repetition, confessions and forgiveness and exhortations to stay the course in the upcoming week. I thought it was nice, how the women all seemed to want to help each other. When Valerie would open the floor, saying “Ladies, let me hear about your triumphs and temptations,” someone would start talking about an upcoming party, or a business trip, or how there’d been birthday cake at the office, and everyone would want to help.

  “They know I’m on a diet!” the birthday-cake woman had wailed. “And I couldn’t not eat it! I had to be polite!” I listened as the other Weight Watchers proposed solutions—Tell them you’re allergic! Take a slice and say it’s for later and throw it away! I wondered if this was what being an adult was: endless denial, requiring limitless willpower. Then I would think about what kind of job I could find where birthday cake was served in the office.

  After a week and a half of deprivation, I had the bright idea to tell Nana I was going upstairs to visit the DiNardos’ cats. “Be back by bedtime,” she said, stirring Sweet’N Low into her coffee. “And take the stairs, not the elevator.” I took the stairs two at a time, galloping up to the fifth floor and presenting myself, red-faced and panting, to Mrs. DiNardo, who seemed surprised to see me. I’d helped my mother take care of Muffin and Mittens before, when the DiNardos went away. Mom would pour dry food into the cats’ bowl, change their water, and clean their litter box, and I would pet them, to the extent that the stand-offish Persians wanted petting, but I’d never stopped in to see the cats while the DiNardos were home.