She forgot to learn not to put her mother’s judgment and opinions before Sam’s. Before everyone else in her life. Before her own.
Daphne had rented rooms in her head to her mother for far too long.
“This, Mom,” she answered Sunny, “is a beautiful dinner I cooked for our family.”
“Is there an occasion I missed?” Sunny tipped her head, lifted her eyebrows, and glanced with intent at Daphne’s midsection.
Daphne weighed responses and then laughed at the choices that came to her.
“What’s so funny?” Her mother frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”
“I’m laughing at both of us.” She raised her wineglass and stood. “A toast. Many toasts. First, to Audrey and Gabe for their patience in taking second place to my obsessions: thinking about weight, worrying about weight, taking off weight, and—”
“For which we toast you,” her mother said. “And—”
“Hold that thought, Mom. I want to toast Sam. Love of my life. You’ve had more patience with my insanity than could be expected from any man. I am endlessly grateful. I will take you for granted no more.”
She leaned down, kissed him softly, smiled, and rubbed his shoulder.
“Yes. We all know your husband is a saint,” Bianca said.
Daphne stuck out her tongue at her sister’s droll words and then lifted her glass. “Bianca? I toast your generous heart. Even when you try to hide it, we all know you use it every day. To my sister, Marissa, I toast your ability to be true to yourself, and to constantly and consistently show kindness in a hostile world.”
“We’re hungry, Mom. Almost done?” Gabe’s discomfort with deeply felt emotions was no doubt her fault, but she saved that mea culpa for another day.
“Soon. To those married to my sisters, I toast how very much you have nudged my family to being that much closer to some semblance of normality.”
Everyone smiled.
“And to Dad. You took your father’s business and grew it far beyond his dreams—thus making enough of a fortune to pay for our lifetime of therapist bills. Just teasing, Dad. Well, not completely. I toast you for providing ballast. For your sense of humor. And most of all, for sneaking me out to get ice cream when I needed it so badly.”
Her mother looked first at Daphne and then at Daphne’s father with a baffled expression.
“Lighten up, Mom. That was a million years ago,” Marissa said.
Her mother reached out for her wineglass, now looking worried. For just a moment, Daphne wanted to let loose with sarcasm and say, “Oh, and thanks for all the diet tips, Mom!” But it was way past time to let go of childish things and move from being a daughter to being a mother, a wife, and, most of all, to becoming an adult of her own making.
“Mom. I toast you for being a tiger mother. You never took your eyes off us. No matter how hard we begged.” Even Sunny joined the laughter on that one.
“I remember what you always said to us when we complained. Would you rather have a mother who doesn’t care? Well, of course not. I’m happy that you cared. You made sure we had good grades. That we worked every summer, so we understood the value of earning our keep. I’m touched that you loved us so much you wanted to make us over in your image.”
Daphne walked over to her mother and took her hand. Her father rose so that Daphne could take his seat. “But no more. You want to be skinny? Great. Be as thin as you like. But I’m never apologizing for eating again. From this day forward, your job is to take your eyes off my body.”
She leaned forward and hugged Sunny, tight enough, she hoped, to take the sting out of her words, but not so much that they didn’t land. “Here’s my goal: I refuse to hate myself anymore. Whatever I weigh, I will embrace myself. If I must buy a dress at the tentmaker’s, because of the oh-so-broad Namath back nature gave me, and if the size of that dress is XXL, it will be made of the softest silk, and I’ll wear it with joy and pride.”
• • •
Daphne gleamed with night cream when she walked into the bedroom. She held the cold white scale. “Here. Take this to work. Throw it in the trash. Lock it in the safe deposit box. Just make sure I can’t find the thing.”
“First your mother and now this? What happened today?”
“Maybe life clicked into place at long last. Perhaps it came from giving advice to a kid; advice that I should have given myself a long time ago. I don’t know where the light shone from, but at least it came. No more instruments of agony in my life. No more making my weight, my body, or my face my defining trait.”
Task-oriented Sam took the scale and left the bedroom.
Imagining and playing out losing weight had become the song she woke to, played all day, and to which she fell asleep. She’d chosen not to marry sad songs, so why was she living a life of whiny ballads?
Sam clapped his hands as though dusting them off when he returned, signaling a finished job. “Safely tucked away. I guarantee you’ll never stumble over it.”
“And if I search for it?”
“You will have embarked on a lost battle. Will Audrey be upset? Without having a scale, I mean. Do she and Gabe have one in their bathroom?”
Being a man must be lovely, never having to know the existence and location of every item in the house. “They did, but our daughter doesn’t believe in scales anymore.”
“I thought for certain your mother had infected her.”
“Oh, she did. Haven’t you noticed the tape measures and caliper? Audrey now subscribes to the school of measurement and body fat versus muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat, she tells me. Far too often.”
Sam fell on the bed and pulled Daphne down with him. “Is that an improvement?”
“I suppose exercise is better than full-on anorexia.” Daphne tossed the useless throw pillows on the floor. The ones she picked up again each morning, only to repeat the loop each night.
Not once did she lie on those ridiculous pillows. They existed to clutter and crowd her life. She vowed that tomorrow morning, they would be gone.
“My mothering hasn’t been golden in this arena. Passing on weight phobia—just what I wanted to avoid and precisely what I managed to do.”
Sam became the analyst he was. “Do you think your benighted trip to Vermont made it worse or better for Audrey?”
“I’m sure I made it worse by going. She witnessed her mother run away and devote a month of her life to getting smaller. I showed her that there was no other way to deal with my insanity except by leaving you guys.”
Sam tipped his head. “She knew you were running from your mother. And the kitchen.”
“Does that make it better or worse?”
“Did you choose your mother issues over us? I suppose you did. Yes, you chose yourself over us. But we were fine. You needed to do something rash. You ended up in crisis, but perhaps that trauma broke the barrier. You didn’t come back the truest new you, but you came back on a path of exploration. And you invited Audrey and Gabe on the journey. And me. For the first time, you didn’t shut us out of the most overarching issue coloring your entire life.”
“What path did I come back on?”
“A route where you crashed out of what you saw as ‘bad you’ in an awful and abusive way. The way those people treated you was so horrific, they voiced things worse than you ever said to yourself. It put you in shock. But—big but—you loved the way you looked. On a third hand, you had no handle on what to do with a change brought on in that manner.”
“And of course, despite being wounded by what they did, for the first time, I nearly liked my body. Which felt like a miracle amid madness.”
“Like cancer,” he said.
“What?”
“People, during cancer, often lose a lot of weight. If they began fat, at some point they usually think, Wow, I look great. But the reason they became thinner is not only beastly, it’s unsustainable. The situation becomes cognitive dissonance at its loudest.”
Sam had wrapped up Daphne’s conun
drum into a perfect sound bite. “I don’t know how to proceed,” she said. “I do love the feeling of verging on small. Should I be like my mother and make thin my goddess?”
“Your mother doesn’t have to fight for her beliefs, hon. She has the metabolism of a hummingbird,” he explained. “The way she acts toward you? Sunny is like a natural runner pushing her crutch-using daughter to keep up with her on the track.”
“That’s kind of harsh. I have a crippled metabolism?”
“No. But you don’t have hers. Sometimes genes are genes. You can modify your activity for workarounds, but none of us is blessed with the right gene for every pursuit.”
“Sunny always had unsustainable dreams for me.”
“For the most part, yes. You can choose where you want to be, but maintain it only when it’s within reasonable ranges. Waisted had impossible methods to maintain, even taking away the fact that for them it was an intellectualized form of proving how much women hate themselves.”
Daphne crisscrossed her legs on top of the quilt. “But you know what? It taught me how vulnerable I am to the worst in myself. And far too vulnerable to my mother. Sunny’s voice accompanies me everywhere.”
“The words you said tonight were a good beginning. Where will you go from here?”
Daphne reached over to the stack of books on her nightstand and grabbed two volumes. “Flavour: Eat What You Love, by Ruby Tandoh,” Sam read the title from the first one and then groaned. His face fell. “No! Another diet book, Daph?”
“No. A not-diet book.”
“How is that different?” Poor Sam had seen her through so many fads and beliefs that this was it.
“She’s a food writer with a cooking show in Britain who struggled with eating disorders as a teen. Now, the only rule she tries to follow is this: eat what you love. Those words petrify me. Eat what I love? I might as well consider running through the streets in a bikini. I need to find out what that means. Do you understand?”
Sam took her hand. “Sort of. But not really.”
“Here are my thoughts broken down to the simplest chunks: I have no idea how to eat what I love. I thought I did. I could list beloved foods forever. But I don’t eat them. I cram them. I sneak them. I jut out my chin and swallow them whole. But I never appreciate them.
“Every bite I take is accompanied by internal chatter: You’re a pig. Apply that to your big fat stomach. Why can’t you ever control yourself? No food is purely enjoyable. Not an apple. Not a bowl of cereal. All I think about is how many carbs. How many grams of sugar. How much fat and how many calories.”
“My poor baby. Why don’t you—”
She stopped him with a palm held out. “Don’t fix me. Or give me a lecture. Please. Just listen. Never in my entire life could I imagine eating without screaming at myself. That’s why I worked so hard at not telling Audrey she was beautiful or thin or anything but smart and healthy. I was afraid to give her the voices.”
“And now?”
“First, I’m banning diet books. And diets.” Daphne held the second book aloft. “This one is to inspire me.”
The title and author’s name, Embrace: My Story from Body Loather to Body Lover by Taryn Brumfitt, was on a black background. The only other visual was a nude woman, in a position that revealed her curves and smile. “I want to learn to love my body—or at least to see if liking is possible.”
Sam pulled her in for a hug. “You will. Feel like and love. And then there will be two of us.”
Daphne brushed away a tear. “I have three other goals. One, I will enjoy eating, and I will no longer let it be the soundtrack of my life. I don’t know if I can achieve that, but tonight I took the first step. Two, I want to move my studio off Newbury Street and relocate someplace that’s easier for everyday women and kids like Constance to come. I don’t want to turn my back on my life’s work, but I want to use my skills in new ways.
“We don’t need the money. I proved I can conquer Hollywood. And the wealthiest of Boston. This one is a present for me—so I can concentrate on people like Constance. People like me, but who don’t have our advantages.”
She thought of telling him that, in truth, there were four goals: the fourth being to throw out the stash of pills hidden in her closet. Daphne thought of those as her soldiers, lined up for battle when she got out of control. With reinforcements always waiting on the shelves of CVS.
She planned to rid herself, physically and psychically, of that insurance policy.
“What about Ivy?” Sam asked. “If you move the business.”
“Ivy’s half of Alchemy thrives all on its own. We can manage just fine. She can be Alchemy Uptown. She’ll be happy to see the last of my pro bono work draining money from the business.”
“And number three?”
TIP: Darling girl, don’t waste a single day of your life being at war with your body, just embrace it.
—Taryn Brumfitt
TRUTH: Daphne had finally found the right tip.
Daphne sat up and crossed her legs. She leaned over and picked up her phone, fiddling until she found the right music. “I don’t just want to be grateful for a lack of sad songs. From this day forward, I’m looking for joy.”
CHAPTER 33
* * *
ALICE
“Does the banner look straight?” Alice asked.
Keely cocked her head to one side and pursed her lips, tipping first to the left and then the right. Libby imitated the older girl, adding in a Grandpa Zeke mannerism by cupping her chin with her thumb and forefinger.
“Perfect,” Keely said finally.
“Perfect!” Libby echoed.
Alice had begun bringing her daughter to the community center when Libby started kindergarten last month. Keely and Libby, both in the afterschool program, had become inseparable. Alice used her rank often, unfair as it was, to bring the girls to her office, using several reasons—most of which translated to My daughter, my prerogative.
When claiming boss privilege induced guilt, she excused herself via motherhood trumping job. Six months ago, right around the time Alice and Clancy began working on their marriage in a down-to-the-guts way, Libby exhibited new neediness, as though she sensed her family was in danger. Immediately, Alice promised herself two things: she’d always be there for her daughter, and she’d give her only the truth.
She promptly broke both vows, but at least she tried. Bebe stepped in when Alice faltered, Alice stepped up for Clancy if his brittle side took over, and Zeke covered for everyone.
“ ‘Smart Is Beautiful,” ‘ Libby read. “How long till the fair? Will there be clowns?”
“We’re not talking about that kind of fair,” Alice said for the hundredth time. Libby acted as though by asking often enough, the upcoming celebration of talent and brains would morph into Ferris wheels and cotton candy.
“This is a time to think about all the good things girls can do even if they’re not pretty.” Keely’s patronizing cadence grated, reminding Alice of her own voice.
“Not exactly, hon. Happiness should never rest on being pretty or not.”
Keely appeared unconvinced.
“No fun?” Libby’s lower lip curled under. “No candy?”
Again, Alice gave a silent Sorry to her own mother as she remembered rolling her eyes whenever Bebe pushed biographies of mixed-race achievers.
“We’ll have a fantastic time. Learning is cool.”
Both girls threw you-gotta-be-kidding looks. She missed Keely’s accepting everything Alice said as gospel. Now, as Keely pretended to be as much Alice’s daughter as Libby was, the girl idolized Alice less.
“Is this like how grown-ups say something is fun, but they really mean it will be good for you?” Keely asked.
“Possibly. But listen to what we’ll have: artists drawing comics of you—both by hand and by computer. You’ll see yourselves as cartoons. We’re having jump-rope contests. Funny tests to find out your talents. And cooking classes.”
�
��But no ice cream.” Libby let loose a theatrical sigh that she must have learned either from their Brooklyn relatives or down South visiting Zeke’s family.
“Come to my office, girls.” Alice once more inspected the three-foot-high banner, the music, art, computer, and book stations and floating balloons.
If it killed her, these little girls wouldn’t hum songs that attempted rhyming bitch and tit. Alice couldn’t protect Libby and Keely from everything, but she planned to devote her fight to keep them from thinking they started out worth less than one other person on earth.
“Each of you can have one lollipop.” Alice unlocked her office. She held out the glass jar filled with cherry pops, the one flavor she hated. That way, she ate only three or four throughout the day.
Her life had become a series of trades and shaving. Her food intake resembled the budget techniques she used to cut the Cobb’s expenses when deficits threatened. At those times, she examined columns of numbers, trimmed here, flaked off a bit there, and eventually reached her bottom-line goal. Replicating the technique for calorie consumption worked. Plus, Alice’s gene for competition had been activated in the good-eating arena.
On the not-proud-mother side, presenting her way of eating as a health choice and flavor preference in front of Libby ensured that much of each evening she felt like a liar and a phony. Being Mommy Truthful was no snap.
“I thought this day was about being gorgeous and skinny.” Keely grabbed a sweet. “You know. Being smart to be beautiful.”
Alice wouldn’t jump down the kid’s throat; no, she would not. Lord only knew what topics Libby and Keely covered. Perhaps wordplay required an older sophistication. “No, hon. We talked about this. Being smart is beautiful.”
“Being pretty is being beautiful.” Libby took a lollipop.
“What do you think being pretty means?”
“You know! Like having nice hair.” She shook her curls till they flew. “And smooth skin. And ruby red lips, like Snow White. And being skinny. Like why you went away.”
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