Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  All of Krantz’s heroines were slim and lovely. Judy Blume never wrote a plus-size protagonist—Blubber, you’ll remember, was not the hero of the story, which was told from the perspective of one of her reluctant tormentors. Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden were both blessed with quick wit and fast metabolisms. Ayla, the heroine of the Clan of the Cave Bear saga, sounded like a supermodel when Jean Auel described her long, smoothly muscled legs, her tumble of white-blond hair and wide blue eyes. Even Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time turned out to be beautiful when she took her glasses off. Nobody had cellulite or belly rolls or stretch marks or size-ten feet; nobody wore a triple-D brassiere made with enough underwire to fashion a set of handcuffs. Everyone’s hair was thick and shiny, not thin and limp and impossible to style; everyone had symmetrical features, not a giant nose stuck between two squinty, close-set eyes, and a chin that was already showing a tendency toward doubling.

  Thank God for Susan Isaacs. Specifically, thank God for Almost Paradise, one of my mother’s book-club picks, which I found the summer I was fifteen. The heroine was another lonely girl with a dead mother and a distant father, only in the case of poor Jane Heissenhuber, her father remarried disastrously to a would-be queen of Cincinnati society who realized, too late, that her husband was a nobody who would never be a somebody. Unfashionably tall, with lashings of long, dark hair, heavy hips, and wide thighs, Jane found love and power and fortune and fame, and never dieted herself to a size any smaller than a ten. Still, a movie star married her, and the public embraced her, and, when it was time for her to conquer her demons and deal with the trauma of her past, her weight was a nonissue, and her regular body didn’t hold her back. Instead, they made her a relatable Everywoman, and a television star in her own right. Jane was my beacon, my writing on the wall. Here was a character, and an author, who told me, You can dream up a happy ending, and you can get it without losing half your body weight first.

  And then there was Nora. I found Fran’s paperback version of Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media in the family-room shelves. The book had a light blue cover filled with a cornucopia of clay renderings in the shapes of a naked female figure, a telephone with a sign reading WOMEN, and a can of vaginal deodorant up front. I savored every essay—Nora’s take on the Pillsbury Bake-Off; on the folly of trying to get your vagina to smell like a bouquet of meadow flowers (and the people whose job it was to sniff women’s crotches and evaluate the product’s effectiveness); on her own imperfect body and persistent flat-chestedness.

  More than the topics, Ephron’s voice captivated me. It was conversational, not writerly, more like hearing my mom talking with her friends than listening to a capital-A Author deliver pronouncements from on high. In my sophomore-year honors English class we were plowing through Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Edith Wharton, American literature’s greatest hits. I knew how literature sounded, I knew the subjects that significant authors considered worthwhile (sin, redemption, suburban ennui, sledding accidents). I didn’t know that real writing could feature things Ephron discussed—breasts and vaginas and recipes for desserts; private parts and personal lives, shame and doubt and heartache. I didn’t know a writer could sound like she did; could write in such an intimate and honest manner, a way that felt not only specifically female but specifically Jewish. This, I thought, was what I wanted for myself. Judith Krantz’s novels were aspirational fairy tales, delicious and diverting but not ultimately attainable. Nora Ephron’s essays were authentic, tough and tender all at once.

  Nora got her start as a journalist, and I imagined a similar future for myself. I wanted to write about women, and how women decided how, and who, they wanted to be in the world. I wanted to write with Ephron’s specificity, her eye for detail and her sense of what mattered: bras that pinched, parents too busy working and feuding and having nervous breakdowns to give their children what they needed, and who’d excuse their lapses with a tossed-off “everything is copy,” and why men always thought it was any available female’s job to locate and deliver food (I’ll never forget Ephron’s riff in Heartburn where her narrative stand-in, the cookbook author and betrayed wife Rachel Samstat, recounts her husband asking, “Do you think butter would be good with this?” as he held up a piece of plain, dry toast).

  Reading gave me a framework, a way forward, a way out. And if Nora was my beacon, Adrienne Rich gave me a map. When I read “Diving into the Wreck,” I glimpsed how stories could be simultaneously rescue and escape.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  I stroke the beam of my lamp

  slowly along the flank

  of something more permanent

  than fish or weed

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  the drowned face always staring

  toward the sun

  the evidence of damage

  worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

  the ribs of the disaster

  curving their assertion

  among the tentative haunters.

  That was how it could work—you’d go down as deep as you had to; you would face “not the story of the wreck” but “the thing itself”; and you’d swim back up to the surface with your arms full of tales to tell, and one of them would be the story of your own escape.

  Road Trip

  My parents had renounced Michigan, building their lives and their family in New England . . . but, much like the Mafia, Michigan kept pulling them back in. At least once a year and sometimes twice, they’d load us into the maroon and cream Chevrolet Suburban with its three rows of seats and double gas tanks and drive back to their ancestral home, where their entire extended families—parents, siblings, nieces and nephews and cousins—continued to reside.

  My mom was afraid of flying, but, even if she hadn’t been, four kids made air travel prohibitively expensive. So for Thanksgiving or the winter holidays or Passover, we’d pile into the car—two adults, four kids, one elderly, rheumy-eyed poodle, and one CB radio into which my father, in dark prescription sunglasses, a plaid shirt and jeans belted beneath his belly and hanging loosely over his flat behind, would mutter a convincing “Breaker one-nine.” Our suitcases would be stacked into a strap-on black canvas ziggurat mounted to the top of the car. My parents would be up front; my sister, my brothers Jake and Joe, who’d arrived in 1978, and the dog would arrange themselves in the back rows; and I’d be in the way-back, behind the third row of seats, lying on top of a pile of suitcases with my book.

  My parents never stopped for meals, as much as we begged for Big Macs and chicken nuggets. Instead, my mom would serve a version of the school lunches the four of us suffered through until we were old enough to prepare our own food, or use part of our allowance to buy hot lunch.

  The day before we left, Fran would gather frozen bagels, sliced turkey breast, apples and cut-up carrots and celery, the cans of Coke my father drank, bottles of unflavored seltzer that the rest of us would share, and a dozen peeled hard-boiled eggs. All of this went into a plastic Playmate cooler, along with the ice packs that were kept in the freezer between trips. I can remember that cooler the way you remember the face of an old friend, or maybe the first guy who broke your heart. Red with white handles and a crosshatched red lid, no matter how carefully we washed it, the cooler carried the permanent sulfurous stink of the hard-boiled eggs, and it would sit there, smugly mocking us as we drove past each highway exit’s signs for McDonald’s and Burger King.

  When we were little, the trips were exciting. Going anywhere was exciting, and going to Michigan, where we’d be fussed over and spoiled, where grandparents would take us out to restaurants for lunch and aunts and uncles would take us bow
ling or to the movies, was one of the highlights of the year.

  But first we had to get there. The mood in the car was one of barely restrained violence. We would tiptoe around my father’s temper while still doing the normal amount of pinching and slapping and squabbling among ourselves. I had books, which I’d read until I got carsick, and Fran would have gone to the library and made tapes of old radio plays, The Lone Ranger and The Shadow. We’d listen, and when even the adventures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto’s efforts to head off the ambush at Medicine Rock couldn’t entertain, Fran would plug a portable black-and-white television set into the car’s cigarette lighter. For maybe an hour of the sixteen-hour trip, the antenna could pull in a strong enough signal to watch a snatch of the news, or a Star Trek rerun.

  Eventually, though, the temptation to start trouble would become too strong. One of us would lift the lid of the metal ashtray built into the car’s armrest and let it snap back into place with an unmistakable and soul-satisfying click.

  Behind the wheel, my father’s shoulders would tense. “Who’s flicking the goddamn ashtrays?” was the typical opening salvo. None of us would answer. There’d be silence, except for whatever was on the radio or the tape deck. Then, just as my father would loosen his grip on the wheel, another click would come, as Joe or Jake or Molly or I couldn’t resist. “GODDAMNIT,” he would yell, jerking the car into the breakdown lane and squealing to a halt, “WHO IS FLICKING THE GODDAMN ASHTRAYS?” He would threaten to Turn This Car Around Right Now if the culprit failed to come clean, and my mother, in between soothing murmurs of “Larry,” would try to appease us by flinging handfuls of sugary cereal into the backseats (I’m sure she actually passed back the box, but in my memory she’s tossing handfuls of flakes or Os at us, like we’re ducks in a pond).

  The journey usually started on a Friday afternoon, the day school let out for Thanksgiving or spring break. We’d get off the bus and into the car, drive for eight hours, get a hotel room when we neared the Canadian border, and sleep, my father and the boys in one bed, my mother, snoring, in the bed with me and Molly.

  Between gas-station stops and bathroom breaks, it would be late afternoon on Saturday when we pulled into my grandparents’ driveway and piled out of the car. By then, we were messy, bedraggled, bed-headed, and road-weary, covered with stray bits of Count Chocula, surrounded by the stink of the hard-boiled eggs.

  Kids and dog would charge into my grandparents’ tastefully decorated, immaculately clean, child-free house. Our first stop was the glass dishes kept full of Brach’s candy, which we’d empty. My brothers would race up and down the halls, around the living room and back again, while I’d endure hugs and kisses, then sprawl on the couch, sniffing the air for the smell of dinner. “Vildechayas,” my Nanna would mutter. Not affectionately. Compared with my aunt Marlene’s four kids, who lived two blocks away, we probably did resemble wild animals, bad-mannered, free-ranging monsters who’d never been taught how to behave or dress or brush their hair.

  My parents would set up their base camp at Nanna and Pappa’s house, and farm the rest of us out. One girl would be dispatched to my father’s mother house, to lounge on silk sheets, swim in a bathtub the size of a small pool, with its own three-step staircase and a mosaic frieze on the wall, and play Crazy Eights late into the night with Grandma Faye, who seemed to never sleep. Another kid would go to the Gurvitzes—my father’s cousin Linda, her husband, Alan, and their kids, Eric and Michelle, who were around our ages. There was a pinball machine in the dining room, which worked even without quarters, and Eric and Michelle each had their own bedroom. Michelle’s room was painted light blue with a rainbow circling the walls. Above her desk was a corkboard lined with certificates of academic achievement. Inside of it was a shoebox full of neatly written love letters from a boy in her class. “He’s just a friend,” she would say nonchalantly, as if every girl had a boy who was crushing on her. Linda, who was bighearted and kind, would let her kids stay home from school when we visited. We’d go bowling or to the movies or out to lunch, commonplace weekend activities for the Michigan cousins, but special treats for us.

  You could stay with my father’s sister, Aunt Renay, and her husband and their son, Evan, whose basement housed a child-size train that you could actually ride on, or you could stay with the Schwartzes, my mother’s sister, Marlene, her husband, Richard, and their four children, the youngest of whom was a year older than me. Their kids’ bathroom had a laundry chute with a metal door, and a passage that ran from the bathroom all the way down to the basement, and was an object of endless fascination for all four of us. (Could a kid fit down that chute? Had anyone tried?) Rachel, the youngest, was the only girl, and her bedroom had an entire wall of closets with mirrored doors, which contained a perfect wardrobe. Every oxford and Izod that I’d ever dreamed of owning, every Benetton or Esprit ensemble, seemed to live in that closet.

  One night we’d all gather for a dinner of takeout sandwiches at Grandma Faye’s. Her house had a curtain made of blue glass beads that hung between the dining room and the kitchen. One of our favorite things to do was to walk back and forth through the beads, letting them brush our hair and face and hands, as Grandma Faye watched in consternation and tried to shoo us toward the deli platters. We would drink Vernors, a kind of soda that you could get only in the Midwest, and eat Sanders Bumpy Cake, a devil’s food cake with ridges of marshmallow topping draped in dark chocolate. Nanna would bake rugelach, twists of sweet pastry wrapped around chopped nuts and jam (or raisins, which I hated). We’d order in Little Caesar’s pizza (which was not yet a national chain) and go out to eat at the Stage Deli, where I’d get a mushroom omelet and rye toast, the exact same thing every time, but I’d order it only after reading slowly through each item on the menu to make sure there wasn’t something else I’d prefer.

  Restaurants were big deals for the four of us. At home, on the rare occasions when we went out to eat, my mother would announce that two or three entrees would be plenty for the four of us. Then she’d decide what those entrees would be. Then she’d order them herself. “If you’re still hungry, you can get more later,” she’d say, when we’d protest that whatever she’d picked wouldn’t be enough. Needless to say, “later” never came, and we’d all go home hungry. In Michigan, though, each kid could order his or her own meal—sometimes with side dishes! And drinks! And dessert!

  Michigan was fun, with going out to eat, or bowling, or to the matinees, hanging around the fringes of the dinner parties and listening to the grown-ups gossip, but with each visit, there were also certain obligations. Visiting the sick, my mother told us, was a mitzvah—a blessing—and our trips to Michigan would also always include a visit to whatever senior center, assisted-care facility, or hospital bed housed whichever aged relatives were unwell. When I was little, my father’s grandmother lived in a nursing home, and I must have wandered off past an open door, where I saw a woman sitting in the wheelchair by her bed, with her thin hair drawn into a bun and a knitted afghan on her lap. “Little girl . . . little girl,” she called.

  I went inside. When I was close enough, she grabbed my hands in both of hers, with a surprisingly strong grip, and started to call me Sarah. “Why don’t you ever come to see me?” she asked. “The doctors are killing me! They’re killing me!”

  “I have to go,” I whispered, looking around desperately for my mom and dad or a nurse to free me. I could see the tops of two legs underneath the afghan, but only one foot on the wheelchair’s footrest. Her hands felt like a bundle of bones loosely wrapped in skin, and were mottled with age spots and ropy blue veins. The room was warm and smelled like chicken soup, mothballs, and pee. I tried to pull away, but the woman gripped harder, her cracked voice rising, calling me Sarah, demanding to know why I’d put her there, why I was letting the doctors kill her. I was old enough to know, by then, that fairy tales were just made up and witches weren’t real, but in that moment, with her fingers locked around my hands, I thought she was going to pull me into
her lap, right up against her, and do something terrible that might have involved cannibalism.

  I pulled. She clung. I think we were both crying by the time someone finally pried the woman’s hands off mine and got me out of her room and back to my parents, who I don’t think had even noticed I was gone. For the rest of my childhood, I hated those visits; hated the smell of those places, the way one parent or the other would put a hand on the small of my back, steering me toward the couch or the chair or the bed, making me speak to whichever relative was in it; the way I was always convinced that someone was going to grab me and not let go, only the next time it happened no one would notice and no one would save me.

  By the time I was a teenager, though, the visits tipped from terror to comic relief.

  “Now, Marty’s been a little depressed,” Fran began one year, leading Molly and me up a driveway on a frosty winter night. “Oh, and remember, he had another stroke.”

  “Hold up, Fran,” Molly would say, but by then Fran had her finger on the doorbell. In we would go, to watch poor Marty talking out of half his mouth, shuffling around the kitchen to make tea, boiling water and gathering mugs with an arm that hung by his side, then sitting on the couch and crying.

  “That was grim,” Molly observed when we were back in the car on our way to the next visit.

  Fran pretended not to hear her. “Next stop! Now, Louise just got out of the hospital.”

  “What was she in the hospital for?” I asked.

  “Diabetes. They had to amputate. Don’t stare.”

  In we went, to a living room that had been emptied of all furniture, with a hospital bed in the center, and a woman, with a sheet draped over the space where her leg used to be, lying on top of it.