Through Thick and Thin

by Alison Pace

  Stephanie thinks this might be an opportunity for positive reinforcement. Surely they’re everywhere if you just know where to look, and maybe that’s what it is lately, maybe lately she’s simply forgotten where to look. “Well that’s good then. Because I think I read somewhere that drinking can play a big part in making weight loss difficult.”

  “What’s that?” Meredith asks, and Stephanie feels a small, tiny internal triumph, Meredith is actually listening rather than talking. It’s a rarity, and like the loss of four pounds, a victory.

  “Drinking. All the drinking can make losing weight harder.”

  “Really, Stephanie?” Meredith says a bit caustically, “I could have sworn it was the eating.” Stephanie doesn’t say anything.

  Stephanie would count to ten, she would count to ten out loud if she felt that would help, but she doesn’t really feel it will. She takes a deep breath and counters, “Well, I think that you can’t look at it as a race to the finish. You have to look at it as a lifestyle change, a permanent change you’re going to make in your life, and I think that’s really the case with any diet we would do.”

  Meredith exhales; it’s an exhale that says, Whatever, Stephanie. Stephanie knows this as she looks at her baggies so lovingly prepared for the next two days. She knows this as she glances through the archway to the family room and the door beyond it and she feels for a moment such a rush of despair that she can’t think of anything to do except stay on the diet. “And also,” she says slowly, measuredly, “I don’t think you have to get the Mastering the Zone book, I think that’s just if you want it, just if, you know, you want to take it up a level.”

  “It’s like freaking Dungeons and Dragons with all the levels!” Meredith says next. “Between the Dungeons and Dragons and the math, all you’d have to do is throw in a field hockey match and it could be a Greatest Hits of everything that sucked about high school.”

  “Speaking of field hockey,” Stephanie says, “it does say that exercise is a big part of this program. Of every program.” And maybe she says that just a little bit to be mean.

  “I just think that if we’re going to do this together—”

  “Not if we are. We are. We’re doing it together,” Stephanie reminds her.

  “Yes, yes, I know, and I swear, really I’m not trying to be a pain.”

  “No, of course not,” Stephanie says and she’s joking, and she’s not.

  “No, Steph, really. I’m not trying to be awful, it’s just maybe, couldn’t we try to find something that might work for both of us? It’s not like you’ve wasted time on the Zone, it’s not like it’s all for nothing. You’ll just start the next diet four pounds ahead of the game, right?”

  “What were you thinking of?” Stephanie asks, taking slow, measured breaths. Look for the positive, she tells herself. Surely, it’s everywhere.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I have felt bad about not embracing it, our diet, because I think it’s important to embrace it, the way you embrace things, and so I did some research. I read up on all these different diets. I think I’m very informed now, and I think I found some that might be easier for me to embrace. And things, generally, are easier for you to embrace, right? I don’t think it’s as hard for you, you’re not as hindered as I am by the need to go out to dinner.”

  “No,” she says, “I’m definitely not hindered by that.” Stephanie thinks of the words easier for you, how Meredith says them as if there is so much truth in them. And she can’t really wrap her head around how she could ever go about explaining to Meredith that easy is no longer in her vocabulary, that the fact that someone isn’t required by her important employer, for her prestigious and coveted job, to eat out night after night in the best restaurants, doesn’t mean life is easy. She tries to be sure that the creeping irritation, the one that spends so much time lately creeping, doesn’t appear in her voice. She tries to make sure the thought, Oh my God, Meredith, lately sometimes I just wish you could talk in sentences and not in paragraphs doesn’t find its way into the conversation either, and asks again, “Okay, Meres, which diet were you thinking of?”

  “Maybe Atkins? I was thinking maybe we’d do Atkins and I can review steak houses. There are so many steak houses in New York, old standbys and some great new ones, too. Can you believe I haven’t even been to Craftsteak?”

  “Craftsteak?”

  “You know, it’s on Tenth Avenue.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I’ve actually heard a lot of very good things about it. Do you know you can have mayonnaise on Atkins? Sometimes I think I could live in a world without bananas if mayonnaise were allowed.”

  And Stephanie, mostly she thinks she’s just so tired, mostly she thinks that, but she soldiers on. “I don’t know, Meres, I heard that Atkins only works as long as you follow it perfectly and as soon as you mess up the tiniest bit, if there’s a drop of sugar in your tuna salad—do you know they actually do that, at the deli they put sugar in the tuna salad—then you gain all the weight you’ve lost back in about a second.”

  “I read that actually,” Meredith says solemnly, sounding a bit discouraged herself. “And I’ve often suspected they put sugar in the lobster salad at Sables. But if they don’t, imagine, you could be on Atkins and just eat container after container of the lobster salad from Sables. I really do think it is, hands down, the best lobster salad in the world. The best I’ve ever tasted, that’s for certain. And I’ve tasted quite a lot of lobster salads in my day.”

  “Alright, even so, I’m not sure I think Atkins is the best way to go.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.”

  “Well what about maybe the South Beach Diet? People really like that, and they even have all the prepackaged foods now.”

  “I don’t know,” Stephanie says, although there is part of her that can picture the South Beach Diet dinners, can picture how easy just popping them in the microwave could be. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about Weight Watchers?”

  “I don’t think I have time to go to Weight Watchers meetings.”

  “I’ve heard from a lot of people who have been on tons of diets that at the end of the day it’s really Weight Watchers that works. It really does the most in terms of getting you to change your bad habits, change your life.” And as she says it, Stephanie actually feels some of the hopefulness returning, the hopefulness that Meredith has been sucking right out of her, ever since she picked up the phone, and on the first ring at that.

  Meredith has nothing, nothing at all to say about Weight Watchers.

  “And you know,” Stephanie continues, and her voice is more than hopeful now, maybe it’s a little wistful, “I think it sounds really nice about Weight Watchers, there’s such a support system. The whole diet, I think it’s built around the concept of community. There’s a whole community of support.”

  “I’m not sure I have the time to start going to Weight Watchers. It’s just, are you really sure Atkins is off the table?”

  “I think so,” Stephanie says, and then, “How do I explain this?” Because she does want to explain it, she really does want Meredith to be able, in some small way at least, to understand. “I like the Zone. I’m starting to feel like it’s working. I feel empowered. You know, I wanted something to happen and it happened. I made it happen.” It feels so good to get it off her chest, to get it out there, and she exhales, and this time the breath is different, it’s not one of impatience or of trying to relay that impatience, but rather of relief. Relief, with a little bit of freedom thrown in for good measure.

  “And that’s a new thing, how?” Meredith asks.

  Stephanie pauses, waits a moment. “Do you have any idea how rare that feeling is in my life?” she asks softly.

  “Honestly, Stephanie. I think that’s all your life is.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” Meredith answers, and Stephanie doesn’t want to think of how far off the mark Meredith’s answer would hav
e been if she’d actually answered.

  “Let’s move on,” Meredith says next, and Stephanie thinks that’s probably for the best. “What about the half diet? Where you eat half of everything?”

  “What?”

  “You cut it in half and eat it. Half.”

  “What stops you from eating the whole thing?”

  “I don’t know, throw it away.”

  “That’s terrible. People are starving in the world.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “Meredith,” Stephanie says. “I just don’t think I’m starting a new diet right now.”

  “Okay,” Meredith says, and pauses. Silence for just one moment before she adds, “but just one thing?”

  “What?”

  “I think maybe if we start something new, we should try to do it when we have a weekend to set aside and then we can do either French Women Don’t Get Fat, or The Detox Diet. With both of those diets, I think you start off by eating only boiled vegetables for the first forty-eight hours.”

  “What?” Stephanie says, paying complete attention again, as something runs through her, so quickly. It’s not a chill, it’s something worse, more awful. It’s in a whole different league than momentarily feeling cold.

  “French Women Don’t Get Fat. It’s a huge bestseller. I read there’s something in there about how you boil up a pound of leeks, and you eat only boiled leeks for a weekend, just to start. For forty-eight hours. I mean, obviously I’d have to not review at all that weekend, but I thought we could try it.”

  “No, what’s the other diet you said?”

  “The Detox Diet,” Meredith says and something in Stephanie turns on; it’s as if she can feel a light switch scratching her, somewhere inside her stomach, and she can feel it burning there. And Meredith keeps talking, “But I think it might actually be a lot harder than French Women Don’t Get Fat. I think it’s from the seventies and it’s all vegetables all the time, which could get extremely tiresome.”

  “Uh-huh,” Stephanie says, and for the life of her, she really doesn’t think she’d be able to say anything else.

  “To tell you the truth, I think if it came down to it, if it were a matter of trying something different, I’m starting to think that French Women Don’t Get Fat would probably be the way to go over The Detox Diet, you know?”

  She knows. She gets up out of her chair, and it’s so strange, this feeling, this feeling like she has known all along, and at the same time, she’s only known for just this second.

  “Yeah,” she says, locating the baby monitor on the counter, the green convex picture of her daughter inside it. She walks over to it and picks it up.

  “Because I think I could eat only vegetables, or it might be only leeks, for forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours isn’t such a long time. You can do anything for forty-eight hours if you put your mind to it, right?”

  “Right.” Stephanie thinks of Aubrey. She thinks of how so much of the time lately Aubrey’s eyes look like they’re two completely different sizes. She’d started to wonder if maybe people’s eyes got that way, so different from each other, when they had to lie all the time. She’d started to wonder, more and more frequently, if maybe people’s eyes started to look like that when they had to look at people they used to love, but didn’t anymore.

  “Meredith,” she says, grabbing the baby monitor, walking out of the kitchen, and into the family room. When she gets to the door, the one that leads down to the workroom, she tucks the cordless between her ear and her shoulder, “I have to go.” She turns the handle on the door.

  “Oh, really? Right when we were finally getting to some common ground about diets? It’s not because you’d rather do the detox diet, is it? Because if you do, we can talk about that?”

  “No,” Stephanie says. “I don’t want to do the detox diet.” She starts down the stairs, the word detox almost ringing in her ears.

  “Okay, that’s good, because real quick, just think of all the French restaurants I could review.”

  It’s as if the word detox is a force pulling her, pulling her to the workroom, and it’s as if she knows exactly what she’s going to find there. At the bottom of the stairs she doesn’t stop, she keeps walking, quicker now than when she was still descending. She walks, baby monitor in one hand, phone in the other, to the corner of the room. She goes to Aubrey’s desk and stands in front of it. She puts the baby monitor down. And there’s a bottle right there, sitting right next to his mouse, and she feels like she doesn’t need to pick it up. She could just leave it there and it’d be the same because she already knows.

  “Because there are so many French restaurants in New York, so many of the all-time greats, the classics. Le Bernardin, of course. And yet Le Bernardin doesn’t even scratch the surface.”

  She picks up the bottle, it’s half-empty, and as she does, she notices two other empty ones directly behind it, next to the Middlebury College Class of ’91 ceramic mug in which he keeps all his pens.

  “And there are so many exceptional newcomers, too.”

  Aubrey Cunningham, it says his name right on it, along with Vicodin, along with Take as needed for pain.

  “And I think with the diet there’s some way that you can really eat what you want, and go anywhere. So if that’s the case, the possibilities could be endless.”

  “Meredith, I have to go,” she says.

  “Stephanie! Have you even been listening to me? Where’d you go? Did Aubrey just get home or something?

  Stephanie thinks of Aubrey’s ACL surgery, timed perfectly so that it was long enough after they moved into the house, and long enough before Ivy was born. And she can’t remember if that’s when he became awful, if that’s when it was, because she can’t really remember a time when he wasn’t. Awful.

  “If I had to say, I’d say you haven’t been listening at all.” She opens the mini-fridge and stares at the bottles and bottles lined up inside. Was he nervous to throw them away? Was he afraid she’d see them and know? Why didn’t he just take them with him and throw them out on the way to the train station, at the station, on the train, somewhere in the city?

  “Are you mad, Stephanie?”

  “Meredith, there’s no way I can make you understand,” she says next and she wonders if that’s what Aubrey will say to her soon. If that’s what she’ll say to Ivy one day. She wonders if there will ever be a time when she’ll be able to know how far all of this will actually reach, how many things it will actually affect, has already affected, while she’s stayed upstairs in the kitchen all this time trying to pretend he wasn’t having an affair. She wants to know when that time will be, when she’ll be able to understand this, understand any of it. She has no idea, she just knows it’s not now.

  “Now who’s being melodramatic?” Meredith asks with a little laugh and when that little laugh, that little poorly timed attempt at injecting humor is met with nothing, not even a little laugh of Stephanie’s own, she says next, a bit exasperated, “I could say the exact same thing to you, Steph. I could say you don’t understand. You don’t understand how hard it is to diet and to do my job.”

  Stephanie shuts the door of the mini-fridge, she notices the plug on the ground next to it. It’s not plugged in. There isn’t even any outlet nearby. It’s just lying there. “Of course I understand how hard it is,” she says, “I’ve always understood.” She sits down at Aubrey’s desk. She puts a hand on the top drawer handle.

  “One, you don’t understand how hard it is. Think how hard you think it is, and then multiply that by a hundred thousand. And two, you haven’t always understood, you just haven’t.”

  She pulls on the handle. It’s locked.

  “Meredith, I can’t do this. I can’t do this right now. I just need a break. I just need to take a break, I need to catch my breath.”

  “I feel exactly the same way. My God, I was beginning to think we’d never see eye to eye on anything again, but thank God, we do. I need a break, too. Maybe two weeks, and then we could
start back up? Maybe we could even try the detox diet then?”

  “Meredith,” Stephanie says softly, seriously, “I don’t want to take a break from dieting. I think I need to take a break from this, from us, just for a minute.”

  “What?”

  “I just really need to take a break from this, from us.”

  Stephanie knows that Meredith, on some level, is trying to figure this out. And she can’t help her, and she knows Meredith, she knows she’s racking her brain right now to say something, something that will make sense out of all this, or even just something snappy. On some level, some part of her that isn’t surrounded by bottles upon bottles of Vicodin, she is surprised that all Meredith comes up with is a slightly spiteful, “Fine.” And then after that, there is a pause in which Stephanie, on that same lost level, wishes she could explain it to her, wishes there could be a way in which she doesn’t seem so awful. But she’s sure there isn’t any way. Or at least she’s sure she can’t figure out a way right now, and Meredith keeps talking.

  “I really thought that this would help us, would maybe make it so that we weren’t so far apart anymore, but it’s not doing that at all. Fine, Stephanie, let’s do that, let’s take a break like we’re some couple who’s dating and who maybe isn’t sure about where things are going, if they’re going anywhere, and we could just end everything forever but let’s first, let’s just take a break. Sounds great to me, Steph.”

  Stephanie doesn’t come to her rescue, doesn’t try to help her, or make it better the way she almost always does, historically, automatically, with everything. She notices a hangnail and tries to forget about it; hangnails are so much better left alone, as hard as they are to leave that way. Pulling at them, which is always the first instinct, never makes it better, always makes it worse, and hangnails, these little tiny things that you think mean nothing, can hurt so much.

  Stephanie stares at the bottle in her hand, stares at the name on it. Aubrey Cunningham. Take as needed for pain. Aubrey Cunningham. She stares at it again and everything else is so far from her mind, except for the fact that the name Aubrey Cunningham is the name of her husband. She thinks this is the first time in her life she has no idea how to handle everything that is hers. She has no idea what to do.