Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  Leslie smiles and flips her hair, chestnut with all these red highlights, some that are almost pink but so well done that they don’t look tacky at all. “Oh, thank you,” she says, and then continues, very seriously, “Some people are all about gray and black and navy in colder weather. But I’m really partial to bright colors, to embracing them year round.”

  Kevin nods as if this were a subject of the utmost importance to him.

  “It’s because I’m from an island,” she says seriously, fingering the turquoise enamel on her necklace.

  The waiter arrivers with Kevin and Leslie’s wineglasses, and sets them down. Meredith wants to turn to Leslie and say, You are from Long Island, but instead turns to the waiter and says, “On second thought, I’d like a martini, please. Grey Goose, straight up. Very dirty. Oh, and I think we need just one more minute before we order.”

  And Kevin gazes at Leslie.

  The waiter smilingly retreats and Meredith efficiently calculates in her mind which dishes she has already sampled twice, which she hasn’t, which need to be ordered and which no longer need to be in the lineup. She “suggests,” to Leslie and Kevin what they “might like” to order, and in the interest of efficiency, requests that Kevin double down on appetizers. She thinks it’ll be okay, and she does want to be sure about the gravlax.

  Meredith concentrates on the lines of the menu, trying to fathom how on earth to properly measure blocks of protein and fat and good carbs, not bad. Slowly (or maybe it’s a bit quicker than slowly) she begins to think it might not be possible to write a good restaurant review while in the Zone. She contemplates a Zone-friendly approach to restaurant reviewing and wonders what indeed would be missing from the world were critics to try, in all seriousness, to review Babbo while avoiding carbs. Or, rather, what would be missing from her world were she to try to do that?

  She tries not to think about that, and decides instead that as long as she’s here, she shouldn’t think too much about ratios and blocks. And it’s not like she hasn’t done anything dietetic. She did, after all, forgo the Sancerre. She wonders how much such a sacrifice counts for as she takes a first sip from her martini. Well-executed martini, she thinks.

  “Everything’s beautifully presented,” Leslie says when their dishes arrive and Kevin nods and smiles at Leslie approvingly. And Meredith, were she inclined to say anything at this juncture, would say that yes, the appetizers came in a more than timely fashion and the quality of the food and the presentation were so exemplary that it more than made up for, in fact canceled out, any initial wait for water. And as she loses herself, loses track of the Zone, she is for a blissful few moments, at one with the mushroom croquettes with goat cheese and pickled ramps. As she samples off Leslie and Kevin’s plate, Leslie and Kevin not really noticing, she thinks how the salmon is unremarkable, but then salmon often is. But the asparagus flan that accompanies it is perfectly cooked, the asparagus and its subtle seasonings blended together flawlessly. She notes again how at Ouest, the sauces are rich but the food is never overwhelmed. It’s a truly perfect balance and she thinks how hard a balance like that is to find in other places, in the Zone for example. She happily moves on to savor a sturgeon presented as if it were a trout. She ponders its wonderful risotto accompaniment, unique, festive almost, with soybeans.

  It’s not until she places her fork down after a sampling (perhaps more than a sampling) of the warm apple crisp with vanilla bean ice cream and caramel sauce, pound cake bread pudding with carmelized bananas and coconut ice cream, as Leslie laughs delicately at something surely witty that Kevin has just said, that it hits her. Kevin is the leading man type, by all means. But he’s not the leading man type in romantic comedies, who despite his good looks and good job and dazzling personality feels quite inclined to date the somewhat beleaguered but plucky (and perhaps a bit overweight) heroine. He is the type of leading man who likes to date models, or some slightly toned-down variation of such. And she wonders if she always secretly thought, all these years, that maybe he’d come around, that maybe he’d be the romantic comedy type of leading man after all.

  Kevin smiles at Leslie dashingly; Meredith takes a small, hopefully fortifying sip of her espresso (it has strength and boldness but no bitterness) and her heart ungraciously sinks. She wants the type of heart that fills up when others find love. But yet hers is the heart that thinks, I have so few single friends left. I have so few people left with whom just to go see a movie. Hers is the heart that thinks, It took me such a long time to warm up to Leslie at all, must I lose her so quickly? And her heart, while it’s on the subject, it would very much like to pose one more query: If Kevin didn’t “think of her that way,” even if it was eight years ago and she was a big enough person to deal with that quite gracefully (ungraceful incident involving the unnecessary returning of a Brita water pitcher notwithstanding) shouldn’t he, out of common courtesy, not like her friend? Even if Leslie was still at this point, and now might always be, more of a coworker than a friend? Or had the statute of limitations on that quite run out?

  “Thanks so much, Meredith,” Kevin says, switching effortlessly from Abby to Meredith as soon as the three are out on the street. The transition is never as easy for her. It’s often a while after she’s taken off her wig and her makeup and written up her notes from the evening that she’s still thinking of herself as someone else. “This was great. And it’s always so nice to see you. Anytime you need a dining friend, I’m your man.” Meredith is reminded of a Cake song she loves, “Friend Is a Four Letter Word.”

  “I’ll definitely be calling on you soon,” she answers, “it was great to see you, too.”

  “All right, supermodel,” Leslie says next. Leslie calls people supermodel, she has a way of saying it that’s friendly and fun, a way of saying it that’s not condescending, even though she herself looks like very much like a supermodel. “Thanks so much, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Indeed,” Meredith says, and can’t help thinking that the thing with friends when you’re in your (almost) mid-thirties, is that a lot of them by this point have gotten married and had babies, even your best friend, who also happens to be your sister. Especially her. And should you find yourself not married, and not with baby, and for whatever reason not a lot of friends who are single, the thought of making a new friend, one who is single like you, one who might be around on Friday nights when you might want to see a movie really does start to appeal. And she thinks it’s not Kevin specifically, not really; it’s more that there aren’t that many people left to go see a movie with.

  Kevin turns to Leslie and says, “You live downtown, right?” And Leslie nods and smiles, of course she smiles. “So do I,” he says next. “We should share a cab.”

  Sometimes Meredith thinks that she might like living downtown. Now is one of those times. Kevin’s arm goes up, and a taxi pulls up, and Kevin says something about, here Meredith you take this one, we’ll get the next one. And she says something about goodnight.

  “Hi,” she says, leaning forward in her taxi, “could you go down to Sixty-fifth and cross there?” The driver makes no indication as to having heard her or not, but heads off at a speed much faster than necessary, south on Broadway. She thinks the direction, if nothing else, could be looked at as optimistic.

  “Cross Seventy-ninth Street!” the driver says loudly, turning too far around in his seat for her, really for anyone’s, liking.

  “That’s fine,” she says and leans her blonde but also fake hair against the back of the seat and closes her eyes for a minute. That’s fine, she repeats in her mind.

  And if she unwittingly set up Leslie and Kevin, that’s fine, too. It’s been a long time since she thought of Kevin that way. And it’s fine, she tries to think, that long before her second martini, she pretty much abandoned any attempt at adhering to the principles of the Zone.

  As the taxi makes a hard left onto Seventy-ninth Street, Meredith looks back up Broadway. She can’t see them standing on the street anymore, wait
ing together for their taxi. She thinks that if she could, if she could not only see them, but also hear them, that she might hear Kevin asking Leslie if she’d like to go to dinner one night soon. Or, maybe he’s leaning over to her right now, and saying, “Hey, maybe this weekend, do you want to go see a movie?”

  nine

  the detox diet

  Ever since she first saw it, Stephanie has always loved the movie She’s Having a Baby, the one that stars Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as a young suburban couple. In fact, it’s right up there, along with The Cutting Edge with Moira Kelly and DB Sweeney as one of her all-time favorite films. She’d always thought of DB Sweeney as one of the most underrated actors of his generation. But that’s not exactly what she’s thinking of right now.

  She’s thinking of this one scene from She’s Having a Baby. It’s this part where Kevin Bacon, who’s at the time terribly tired of the couple’s baby-having efforts, the charts and the fertility times and the scheduled sex, meets another woman. He meets this woman by the fountain at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago and when he looks at her, he looks at her like he’s going to forget for a while all about Elizabeth McGovern. And then right after that, the very next scene, Kevin Bacon is on the train, heading back to the suburbs and he looks really tired. For the longest time, Stephanie always thought he’d just looked at the woman (who, by the way, happened to be French) standing in front of the fountain and had then turned right around and gotten on his train and gone home to Elizabeth McGovern. It was the longest time she thought that, until someone pointed out to her that, no, he had in fact had an affair. Even though it was all off camera, it still happened. Just because you didn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. And for a long time, Stephanie had wished she didn’t know that.

  “Okay,” Stephanie says out loud to herself, once Ivy has rested her just-burped self, her precious blonde head, down on her shoulder. She tries to make a mental note again not to talk out loud to herself. She thinks there might be something alarming to the trend that has been, for a while now, developing. And so she thinks to herself, rather than saying out loud, I am not going to go on UrbanBaby today. She is sure there is darkness there, in the nameless, faceless lines of pink and green text. And she’s sure spending all that time lurking in a chat room, even one about babies, staring so long at a computer, it’s so Aubrey-like in its isolation, if you think about it. And at this point, Stephanie would really rather not.

  There’s the Junior League of Ridgewood, she’s considering looking into that. There’s the New Mommy Group that she’s already part of and just needs to make an effort to like more. She missed the last meeting, she really shouldn’t have; if she’s learned anything from all her years of team sports it’s that you show up. No matter what. You show up and you play. By the rules. She’s always thought so, and believing in that has always worked out well.

  She puts Ivy down in her crib, and Ivy stays down and Stephanie takes a moment to be happy for that. She wants to have a moment in which she’s aware she’s happy; lately she thinks they’re harder to come by. And also, she wants the Baby Sleeping Gods, whoever they are and she’s sure they must exist, to know she really appreciates it, to know she really, really does, whenever it is that they make it so that Ivy sleeps. Even if it is mostly during the day.

  As she makes her way downstairs, instead of going into their office, where there is darkness in the sunlight that glints so cheerfully across the side of Aubrey’s desk, she heads through the family room and into the kitchen.

  She has a new system. She has been putting perfectly sliced squares of part-skim mozzarella cheese into Ziploc baggies. She’s pretty sure the answer is to have everything planned out and baggied up in advance. She pulls a baggie from the red cardboard box, reaching simultaneously into the cabinet where she keeps the Goldfish pretzels. Baggies, baggies everywhere replete with premeasured blocks of proteins and fats and carbs. Brilliant, flawless. Except of course for the part-skim mozzarella cheese. That’s actually a bit complicated because part-skim mozzarella cheese is in fact both a fat block and a protein block. And if you think about things like that too much, it can be quite discouraging, discouraging enough so that you’ll need to devote a fair amount of time (time you might not feel you have) to reading the testimonials peppered throughout the book, all the many success stories—Kathy L., Lori P., Don R. to name but a few—in order to get back on track.

  She counts out pretzels and puts them into piles of fourteen. She thinks she’ll sign up for one of those breast cancer walks, or AIDS walks, or MS. The ones where you walk all day, every day, for three days and sleep in tents at night. She’ll bring Ivy with her. As she slides the pretzels into their baggies she thinks how in The Zone by Barry Sears, PhD, there is no mention of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish pretzels. She wonders if they are possibly a trick learned later in Mastering the Zone, or if maybe, unbeknownst to her, Caryn just made it up. She wonders.

  She thinks of Kevin Bacon on the train ride back to the suburbs and the way he looked, so exhausted, so tired, so defeated, so different from the way he looked when he looked at the French woman. When he looked at her, he looked so alive. Aubrey doesn’t very often look alive anymore.

  When the phone rings a moment later, it’s all she can do not to say, Thank you, out loud, as she picks it up.

  “Hello.”

  “Look at you answering the phone on the first ring,” Meredith says in a pleasant and jovial tone of voice, especially so for Meredith. And yet it annoys her, which is so unlike Stephanie and especially so unlike her toward Meredith, even though Meres has the propensity to be—especially lately and more and more frequently—somewhere in the general vicinity of annoying.

  “Hi, Meres.”

  “Okay. So, Steph, I’m just saying, the Zone sucks.”

  Stephanie takes a deep, measured breath and lets it out. She does this, she’s pretty sure, as much for Meredith to hear her as for its purported relaxing qualities. “I don’t think the Zone sucks.”

  “Okay, how much weight have you lost?”

  “Meres, the same as yesterday. I’m only weighing myself once a week. You know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself more than once a week,” Stephanie says, though actually as she says that she wonders, Does Meredith know that? Is that information garnered actually from the book or did she get that from Caryn, too? Or maybe did she just make it up herself? For the life of her right now, she has no idea.

  “Okay, so four pounds?” Meredith says. And the way she says it, Stephanie can’t help but notice that she sort of spits out “four pounds,” like it’s nothing. Four pounds, she says, like it’s not a big deal at all, like it isn’t a little bit of a triumph. But it is.

  “Yes, four pounds,” Stephanie says. She says the number with pride and tries not to think of what a small number it is when viewed in the context of how much more she has to lose. It’s still a triumph, or even a victory. She believes that.

  “Okay, well, good,” Meredith says, pausing (could it be reflectively? Or is it far more likely just a pause?) and then she continues, “I’m happy for you, it’s just, I’ve lost none.” Stephanie doesn’t say anything, she waits to see if Meredith is going to offer up any self-analytical insight, if she has some story to tell or if, rather, “The Zone sucks,” is her only story.

  Meredith doesn’t say anything.

  “I mean, Mere, are you actually doing it?” she asks, as gently as she thinks she can. “Are you counting everything up and adding it properly? Are you measuring things? I have this system, maybe it’ll help you, see I use baggies—”

  “No, see that’s just it,” Meredith cuts her off, before even waiting to see what the baggies could be for. “I can’t bring baggies out to dinner with me,” she continues, sounding, Stephanie thinks, just a bit closer to incensed with each word. “But I could avoid things. Maybe if we did Atkins? Then I could just avoid all carbs? The Zone isn’t just avoiding all carbs, it’s so much more complicated than that.”
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  “Maybe you shouldn’t look at it as more complicated, but rather as more flexible?” Stephanie offers, trying not to think about other things, trying really just to think about helping Meredith, about getting Meredith to stick with this, with her, because that will help. It will help both of them. “Really, Meres, when you think about it, The Zone truly is more flexible because it does in fact allow carbs. Just not bad ones and you just have to have them in the right proportion to your fats and your proteins.” And as Stephanie says this, she feels like she gets it, like she understands, like she’s in control. And that’s one more thing than the previous zero things of which she’d felt in control.

  “It’s too much math,” Meredith says back quickly. “You know I hate math. And it’s the Zone,” she continues in a singsong voice, but not such a nice singsong voice. “And then, once you’ve figured that out, it’s not as if that’s enough, it’s all, okay now let’s move on up to the next level, let’s try Mastering the Zone, let’s buy another book, in addition to the recipe book that I never get to use because I never get to eat at home.”

  “I thought you were eating at home?”

  “Stephanie,” Meredith continues, a quick and halting emphasis on each syllable, Steph-a-nie, “you know how hard it is for me. It’s not like I can just sit down each night at home to my Zone-prepared dinner. It is really hard for me to justify eating at home. Do you know how much work I have to do? Do you how much harder I make it on myself if I stay home?”

  “I’m not saying you don’t have work to do,” Stephanie replies. “I’m just saying it because you were the one who said you weren’t going to go out as much.”

  “I said lunch. I was talking about lunch.”

  “Okay, right.”

  “But I don’t even know if I should do that, I mean lunch is important, it’s as important in some places as dinner,” she explains, and then as an important addendum, adds on quickly, “it’s just dinner without the cocktails.”