by Alison Pace
Meredith sits up a bit straighter, tucks a thumb into the waistband of her jeans, and pulls them up a bit, up and over her stomach, which she will only call her stomach. She will not say roll or pooch, because it might actually be more than that, and also, attributing the words roll and pooch to one’s body parts can’t be considered productive. She will say, however, that low-waisted jeans (a fashion trend she can now see she was wrong to have tried to embrace) are not friends. She has seriously begun to contemplate the very real possibility that low-waisted jeans are in fact the devil’s playthings.
“What diet?” Meredith asks. Just to be polite.
“The Zone,” Stephanie tells her. “Caryn lost twenty-five pounds on it.” Caryn, Meredith thinks, could very well be one of those annoying women in Manhattan, the miniature ones whose numbers are legion and vast, who actually look good in Seven, Citizens of Humanity, Hudson, Rock & Republic, True Religion and all the other myriad brands of low-waisted jeans that are everywhere. Meredith knows all their names (the names of the low-waisted jeans, not of the miniature women). She would bet right now that Caryn, even when she was pregnant, has never actually seen the other side of size six. Meredith does at times see how it’s wrong to hate people on sight. Now is not one of those times.
“Caryn actually did the thing where they deliver it every day to you, three meals and a snack. But I’m just going to do it with the book. I have the book,” Stephanie says authoritatively, and Meredith worries for a moment that she’s going to jump up and get the book and brandish it at her. But that doesn’t happen. Stephanie only adds hopefully, almost as wistfully as when she remembered Meredith’s wigs, “People say it’s complicated, but I can’t see how it can be that complicated. I mean, it’s just a diet.”
Just a diet. Meredith doesn’t think there’s any such thing. But Stephanie doesn’t know that, how could she? She doesn’t have the advantage of accumulated years of knowledge that Meredith has. Stephanie hasn’t spent her entire life feeling fat.
“See, how it works is . . .” Stephanie begins to explain something, something about the ratios of fats and proteins and carbohydrates, but Meredith isn’t really listening. She’s thinking that she’s heard it all before and she doesn’t want to hear the intricacies of this particular diet, doesn’t want to know why it’s easy to follow, why this one will work. She’s thinking that even with everything they used to have in common, before there was Aubrey and Ivy and Ridgewood, before everything changed but Meredith didn’t, now the one thing they have in common is this. Weight. Weight that needs to be lost.
She turns her attention back to Stephanie. She tries to focus, because she thinks she might see a little bit of a glimmer in her sister’s eyes again, and she thinks that right about now, Stephanie could use a bit of a glimmer.
“Jennifer Aniston swears by it,” Stephanie concludes triumphantly, both as summary and as further proof that clearly the Zone must be very effective indeed.
“Jennifer Aniston doesn’t count,” Meredith says, in spite of the glimmer, and really, in spite of herself.
“Love Jennifer!” Stephanie answers back quickly, as much a protest as an urgent request.
“No, I do love Jennifer,” Meredith says, because it’s not that she doesn’t love Jennifer Aniston, and it’s not that she doesn’t agree with Stephanie’s wholehearted assertions that Jennifer Aniston needs everyone’s love and support what with all the absolute awfulness with Brad and Angelina. “I just think Jennifer Aniston is too skinny to be a dieting touchstone,” Meredith explains.
Stephanie’s cheeks puff momentarily, her hair moves up in the air as she exhales. She shouldn’t have done that with the highlights, it looks too different, weird different.
“Well, Meres, right about now, I could use a dieting touchstone, and Jennifer Aniston is as good as any.”
Touchstone, Meredith thinks. They used to be each other’s, on everything, and now they’re not, on anything. Not even on this, the new thing that Meredith had just decided they had in common, even if the new thing was only weight that should be shed, lost, evaporated, and forgotten.
“I think she lost thirty pounds, you know, before she was even on Friends,” Stephanie continues. “That counts. And we love Jennifer.”
“Yes, we do,” Meredith says and thinks, Maybe it is something, maybe it does count, and after a moment asks, “So, when are you starting?” It’s a question she stopped asking herself a long time ago because, pretty much, it’s a very big question.
“Not this week,” Stephanie says, “the week after.” Meredith nods. She doesn’t ask why the delay, because there is always a perfectly good reason, always has been. She looks at the alligator hand puppet on the television screen, his puppet face all scrunched so that he looks a bit annoyed, and she tries not to think about it.
“Do you know how much weight I actually have to lose to get to where I want to be?” Stephanie asks.
“How much?”
Stephanie takes Meredith’s hand and holds it; she always does this during moments she feels are important. Quickly, she blurts out a number. The number. Meredith nods, and thinks she could lose that much, too. More even, except for the fact that she doesn’t want to do this. She squeezes Stephanie’s hand.
“You can do it,” she says, and is it, the way she says it, maybe a bit wistful? Does she sound a little bit how Stephanie sounded when she was talking about the wigs? Surely not.
“Thanks, Meres,” Stephanie smiles appreciatively and lets go of her hand and they turn their attention back to the puppets and blocks on the TV screen and to the occasional bounce of Ivy’s head. Meredith thinks of Jennifer Aniston and of Caryn the power-walking neighbor who did or did not lose twenty-five pounds. She thinks that Stephanie didn’t ask her to do the Zone with her. She doesn’t want to wonder why.
She thinks instead that if Stephanie’s going to go on a diet, then she needs a good send-off. She thinks maybe she’ll borrow Stephanie’s car and run to the store and get the ingredients for a lasagna and she and Stephanie, and Aubrey, if he ever comes up from the basement, will have lasagna instead of going to the Village Green Café. Going out as much as she does, Meredith sometimes loves a home-cooked meal. She loves the layering of the noodles, and the meat sauce, and the three different kinds of cheese, mozzarella, Parmesan, ricotta. Meredith has often thought that there might be no better freedom than lasagna. Freedom from complicated recipes, and reservations, and too much importance placed on spices. Freedom from measuring, from searching for perfection, from having to always be somewhere, from having to always be someone else.
They say that even bad pizza is good, but Meredith has never thought that to be true about pizza. She thinks bad pizza is bad, but she’s never thought that about lasagna. She doesn’t think a bad one has existed or will exist in the future world, ever. And if you think about it that way, what is there really that is better than lasagna?
three
a little more about josh
Okay. He did call, there’s that. But, just so you know, there are plenty of other things, too.
There’d been—what was it—a year, in which Meredith had waited for him to call. (It was in fact closer to two years if a person was inclined to be honest about it.) And then, after that, there’d been a shorter period of time in which she hadn’t waited, but had occasionally thought, Now he’ll call because I don’t want him anymore, and they know not to come back until you don’t want them. She was sure she’d heard that somewhere, but then she was also sure that thinking something like that could very well cancel out the whole “I don’t want him anymore,” in the first place. And then she didn’t think it, or want it, she really didn’t, and he still didn’t call.
And then he called.
“I was wondering if you were free on February fourteenth? It’s a Tuesday,” he’d said the second time he called, as if the greatest relevance of that day was that it was a Tuesday. “Because I’ll be in New York,” he’d added on, and there was something
in the tone of his voice that made Meredith think of the drawings in her high school French textbooks, the cartoon figures with names like Marie-Claude, Pascal, Jean Christophe, who would point and exclaim into a bubble above their heads, Quelle Coincidence!
“I’m free,” she’d told him. And she didn’t have to hang up the phone and rearrange her busy Valentine’s Day schedule so that she could nonchalantly see him. She was actually, come to think of it, free. In fairness, Valentine’s Day wasn’t a good night to review a restaurant, what with all the tourists and the special Valentine’s Day menus. She had briefly toyed with doing a Valentine’s Day survey. (Meredith loves surveys, like the one that Frank Bruni, the critic at the New York Times, did on fast-food restaurants across the country; she still wishes she’d thought of that.) She had briefly considered dashing from restaurant to restaurant, having dinner at each one; she could probably fit in four if she started early enough, five if she planned on staying out very late. A survey always appealed, but then there was something about the thought of racing around New York on Valentine’s Day, without a Valentine’s Day date, that made the idea of putting pins in her eyes hold a certain appeal, too.
And to be fair, she was free on Valentine’s Day because it had been quite a while since she’d come across anyone she liked. To be honest, it’s not as if she’s really come across anyone else, met anyone else, in lo these many years since Josh had been gone. (And in this case, “lo these many” is equal to three.)
“Guess where I made reservations?” he’d asked her on the third time he called, “it starts with a B.”
And she’d thought they’d done an okay job of getting past the awkward moment when she’d said, with quite a lot of enthusiasm, “Babbo?! How great! Babbo, hands down, is my favorite restaurant in New York!” and he’d said back, with less enthusiasm, “No, Bouley.”
For the record, had she been given the opportunity to lie, she would have. She would have had no problem saying, “My favorite restaurant, the best restaurant in New York, is Bouley.” Bouley, Babbo, though very different, in Meredith’s opinion they both fit the criteria to be the best: beautiful atmosphere, impeccable food, outstanding service, originality, creativity.
The phone rings and Meredith jumps. She’s not startled by the ringing itself, or even by the interruption of her thoughts; she’s just trying to get to it on the first ring. She always tries to get to the phone on the first ring, her logic being that if she always picks up the phone on the first ring, then maybe so will everyone else. Eventually, it’ll have a domino effect. Everyone will pick up the phone right away, it will be what people do, and she won’t ever have to sit idly waiting, listening to a ringing phone. And maybe next, if people start picking up their damn phones on the first ring, inspired by her good example, if she ever manages to improve the world in that way, she thinks she’d like to tackle being put on hold. Call waiting in general. She always feels as if there is so much to do, and she likes that feeling; sometimes she feels bad about it though, sometimes she feels as if she’ll never accomplish enough.
“Hello?” she says. She hears a new sort of urgency, an acceleration in her voice, and it occurs to her that she’s worried, worried that it might be Josh calling to cancel.
“What are you wearing?” Stephanie asks. Their conversations have never been hindered by the need for introductory “how are you?”s and “what’s new?”s, since there used to be so many of them. Meredith looks down at her painstakingly selected but resultantly uninspired ensemble. It seems almost too boring to describe, she’s disappointed at that.
“What do you think I’m wearing? I’m wearing black,” she says.
“Snappy,” Stephanie observes. Stephanie’s right, she’s snappy. She should be more excited than snappy. Shouldn’t she be more excited? Shouldn’t she be, frankly, head over heels excited that the man with whom she used to be head over heels in love with (at least she’d thought that’s what it was) has called and asked her out for Valentine’s Day?
“Yeah, no. I’m fine,” Meredith says,
“Are you nervous?” Stephanie inquires.
“No, I’m just . . .” Meredith begins but doesn’t finish because she doesn’t know what should come next. She doesn’t know what she is right now, and hopes maybe this small feeling of dread that’s in the place of where the excitement should be, could actually just be nervousness after all. Nerves, she thinks. Nothing at all to worry about.
“Look, if nothing else, it’s dinner at Bouley,” Stephanie offers cheerfully, the time-tested consolation to daters. If nothing else it’s dinner at, insert name of admired/sought after/artfully selected /hard-to-get reservations at/expensive restaurant here. People, even Stephanie it seems, forget that it’s not the same for Meredith, who can go to any restaurant she’d like, and pretty much does.
“Right, dinner at Bouley is always nice,” Meredith agrees, because right now she wants to agree with Stephanie, wants to be of the same mind-set as Stephanie, for whom things so often work out nicely. She’d like, as she embarks on her evening, to bring some (if not quite a lot) of Stephanie’s goodwill, and good luck, along with her.
“But, Steph,” Meredith says next, because she thinks maybe she should check, “how does it work?”
“What’s that?”
“How does it work?” she repeats. “I mean, can people really just come back?”
She asks because she really would like to know, even though she doubts that Stephanie could be the one to tell her. Stephanie, who has been with Aubrey for so long, and who Meredith doesn’t think has any idea what it feels like to be left. As she waits for Stephanie to have a good answer—to say something along the lines of Sure, of course, look, they have, right?—she wonders about people coming back, and if you can in fact believe the things they tell you when they do.
“Just see what happens. Really. Try not to think about it all so much,” Stephanie says, with a certain degree of earnestness, and Meredith considers it as an option, though not seriously. Meredith never listens, Stephanie knows this. Meredith thinks instead about what can and can’t be forgotten. “Really,” Stephanie adds, wanting to make her point, “it’s as good advice as any.”
“Thanks,” Meredith says, and then, trying to move on from the topic that isn’t going anywhere, at least not right now, she asks Stephanie, “Are you guys doing anything?”
“Oh, you know, I don’t know,” Stephanie says, and she says it so quickly that Meredith wonders for a second if it’s coy—dare she say smug. Though, more likely, it’s probably more protective than anything else, more, Meres, love, don’t trouble yourself with thinking about my Valentine’s Day with my cute, sporty, outdoorsy husband whom everyone loves, even those not so outdoorsy. You have to think less, like I just told you. Maybe, most likely, that’s what it is. But the thing is, and this is what bothers her, is that she just can’t be sure.
four
trouble sleeping
The evening’s special menu is made from pink handmade paper, with marbled lines of white running across it, speckled with dried and flattened flower stems. Valentine’s Day Menu is printed across the top, without flourish, in what could even be Times New Roman, twelve-point font.
“You know what we should do?” Josh asks, looking up from his menu.
Yes, I know! Meredith thinks. We should perhaps start by acknowledging the fact that this is actually a date, and a big-deal date at that, it being Valentine’s Day and all? Let’s, let’s do that. Let’s not call today “Tuesday, the fourteenth” anymore. Let’s call it a Valentine’s Day Date. A rekindling of a long-ago and quite effectively doused fire. Let’s call it what it is, a date at Bouley, on Valentine’s Day because you are, as it turns out in the end, sorry that you left me, and because you see now, so clearly, that it’s all been a big mistake?
“No, what’s that?” she says, in lieu.
“We should go, section by section, through the menu and make sure that we don’t order any of the same dishes. For example,
” he says, angling his menu so she can see it, even though, clearly, she is in possession of her own menu. “Well, the first is just Chef’s Canape, so we’ll both have that obviously,” he explains, actually pointing to that line with his index finger. “But here, look,” he continues, index finger following suit, “for the first course, why don’t I get the Phyllo Crusted Florida Shrimp, Cape Cod Baby Squid, Scuba Dived Sea Scallop, Sweet Maryland Crabmeat in an Ocean Herbal Broth, and you get the Sashimi Quality Tuna, Nantucket Bay Scallops and Osetra Caviar Tartar with Organic Micro Greens and Lavender Olive Sea Salt?”
Josh nods his head authoritatively, right after sea salt, beaming as if it was he who gathered every ingredient on the entire menu and presented it in such an appetizing fashion. It feels like waking up from a strange and confusing dream, as she remembers, hazily, a bit fuzzily, Josh’s disinclination toward shorthand or summary. With menus. With some other things, too. It would, she now recalls, be quite impossible for him to say, I could get the first thing, and you could get the second. She’d forgotten that.
“And then . . .” he continues, continuing also to beam with what Meredith can only still identify as pride, “I could get the Cape Cod Monkfish Stuffed with Asparagus with Jerusalem Artichoke Puree and Garlic Coconut Cloud, and you could get—”
