I Was Told There'd Be Cake

by Sloane Crosley

  Stage 6: Investigation

  There is no etiquette, no protocol for asking one’s friends, “Did you by any chance take a dump on my floor after dinner the other night?” It’s awkward. This seems obvious enough, but there are actually certain physical fallibilities for which polite society will allow. People sneeze in public, pee in the woods, burp into their fists, men adjust themselves, women get products that publicly compete to “stop leaks,” they breastfeed, their children spit up on their blouses, and we shrug our shoulders. There’s nothing to be done. This isn’t Edith Wharton’s New York. Nobody’s perfect. We’re only human after all. But shit on the carpet is so outlandish—so potentially hostile—suffice it to say, no one, but no one, is used to being questioned about it. It is utterly unbroachable. It’s a far cry from “Did you just fart?” On the off chance you pass the first hurdle of putting such a question on the table, you then have the second hurdle of the answer. Who would confess to such a thing? (Professor Plum. With the turdzilla. In the bathroom.)

  As you reach for the phone, trying to decide whom to call first, the worst part of the situation dawns on you. Statistically, what were the chances that no matter how the shit got there, the fourth person left it? What if the first person to use the bathroom left the poo ball and everyone who went in after has been thinking, “Jesus, she’s got shit on her floor.” You comb your memory for the order, but find nothing. People tend to comment on how small your bathroom is. They usually say something like, “Your bathroom is really small.” But even this throwaway remark cannot be fished out of the garbage disposal of your memory. Looks like you had too much wine at dinner. Apparently not enough to relieve yourself during dessert, but enough to lose sight of the bathroom processional.

  You decide to call the least likely candidate to have left the turd but the most likely to have taken note of it. Your first tactic is to get comfortable by fishing for compliments.

  JUSTINE: It was good, it was. You’re too hard on yourself.

  YOU: You don’t think there was too much chocolate?

  JUSTINE: Remember who you’re talking to. There’s no such thing as too much chocolate.

  YOU: Oh, I think maybe there is.

  JUSTINE: I ate two slices. Either way, it was good to see you.

  YOU: Ditto. Did Trevor have fun? I’m sorry about the whole fuckface incident. I feel like this is the first time I’ve gotten to spend more than five seconds with him. Maybe I need to get to…

  JUSTINE: Know him better?

  YOU: Yes, that. Was he angry?

  JUSTINE: Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it. I think he thought you were kidding.

  YOU: Oh. I probably was. He’s not lactose intolerant, is he?

  JUSTINE: What a question. You know? I don’t know. Why?

  YOU: Some people are not tolerant of lactose. Good to know if I do this again. Ixnay on the omemade ice creamay. What about sweets? Fiber? My cousin has a wheat allergy.

  JUSTINE: I don’t know what he’s allergic to.

  YOU: Sorry, just trying to think of others.

  JUSTINE: Really? Are you feeling okay?

  YOU: I’m good. You? Any gastrointestinal issues you’d like to share at this juncture?

  This is not working out. You curse yourself for being so uninterested in the health of others on a normal basis that your present concern is highly conspicuous. You try Mia next. Something about her being another girl makes her seem like less of a candidate for baking up a nice shit cake and serving a slice of it on your bathroom carpet.

  You call her on her cell phone, which she answers from the Fung Wah bus on the way to D.C. This girl opens her mouth and the words come out in the shape of grinning doll heads.

  MIA: Hi, honey! Ryan and I had such a blast at your casa the other night? That tart?

  YOU: So you digested the tart, then?

  MIA: Huh?

  YOU: You enjoyed it?

  MIA: Yummyness.

  YOU: Good, I’m glad.

  MIA: We miss you! We have to tart it up more often!

  YOU: That we do, that we do. Only thing is the cleanup. I must use every piece of kitchen equipment I have to make this tiny flat tart.

  MIA: You could always make cakes.

  YOU: Cakes?

  MIA: You’re a dessert snob. I love you, but you are! Ha!

  YOU: I guess cakes would be easier to clean up. It’s hard, in a small apartment, keeping everything clean…hygienic…

  MIA (sounds of Chinese children in the seats behind her): Ryan has to bribe me with oral sex to get me to do the dishes.

  YOU: There’s a piece of information.

  MIA: Hey, hold on a second. That’s Justine on the other line.

  YOU: Sure, go, go.

  MIA: Can I call you right back? She sounds a little upset.

  YOU: Oh?

  MIA: Something about lactose and how she doesn’t feel like she knows Trevor at all anymore.

  Your fecal investigation is spiraling out of control and you need to rein it in. You decide not to call Ryan, the only other guest whose number you have. You’re not sure why but you think it has something to do with the following: If it turns out he’s at the center of Shittergate that will be awful and ruin what’s left of your friendship. What will be infinitely worse, however, is if he’s not the culprit and it remains a mystery.

  In a few months, Justine will break up with Trevor. She will credit the night they came over to your place for dessert as the beginning of the end. You’ll see each other on occasion. You’ll have whole conversations on each other’s voice mail until one day you won’t. Eventually, you will run into Ryan in a park on the Lower East Side. He and Mia will be engaged and quitting their jobs to work on a Greenpeace boat. You’ll say, “That’s great,” when the fact is you didn’t know Greenpeace existed anymore. But this line of thinking will remind you that you need stamps. You will chat with Ryan for an appropriate amount of time and then an akwardness will descend.

  During this lull in the conversation, you will plot a denouement in your head.

  YOU: Ryan?

  RYAN: Yeah?

  YOU: About a year ago, did you happen to take a crap on my bathroom floor?

  But before you open your mouth, you’ll stop yourself. You will look hard at your old friend, your good friend, your friend who might be rescuing baby penguins or passing out bumper stickers this time next week. You’ll wonder what you’d get out of knowing and at what price. You’ll take a moment to think about the kind of person who is out to save the planet and hope that they couldn’t do that if they were easily offended by the billions of people on it. You’ll be grateful that a long time ago this kind of person chose to be your friend. But now you’ll realize that even a person like this outgrows his friends. Even a person like this makes mistakes, can’t always hold on to everything they’d like to, can’t always force the world to spin in the direction of their choosing. You’ll hug him longer than necessary and tell him to keep in touch. And you’ll know, finally, that it had nothing to do with you.

  LAY LIKE BROCCOLI

  I am not a very good vegetarian anymore. There, I said it. Sure, I still like to veg out. Be still like vegetables. Lay like broccoli. But I used to be an exemplary vegetarian. A few years ago The New Yorker ran a cartoon of one woman explaining to another during a meal: “I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it’s just to annoy people.” Four people sent me that cartoon, including my mother. Who faxed it to me. At work. I grew to accept the fact that my refusal to eat anything that once had the will to crap was a source of amusement for others. And I learned to keep a set of (vegetable) stock answers at my disposal for all queries about my diet.

  Most of your shoes are made of leather or suede. Why is that?

  “Because I’m not going to eat my boots, that’s why. There’s a big difference between stepping on something and making it a part of you. I’m not going to eat sidewalk either.”

  What do you mean “no
meat”? No chicken? No lobster?

  “Just venison.”

  Potatoes have eyes and you eat those.

  No response.

  The problem now is I’m not sure I have the right to champion the vegetarian cause. Not anymore. What follows is my journey into and back out of the temple of the seitanic. A roughage exposé, if you will. And I did.

  The first thing to understand is that being a vegetarian is actually a pretty private matter. I am still taken aback by the question “Then what do you eat?” and am embarrassed as I struggle to produce the week’s food diary. It’s not that I’m ashamed of what I eat, but it’s none of anyone’s business. I imagine I would have a similar feeling counting up how many pairs of underwear I went through in a week. The only reason opening someone’s refrigerator is more socially acceptable than opening someone’s medicine cabinet is that people keep beer in their refrigerator.

  As a lifestyle once kept between a select few and that now has many coming out of the freezer, being a vegetarian in New York is not unlike being gay. Vegetarian restaurants and options abound. I have the same number of veggie friends as I do gay friends. Because it’s so common and often even hip to be a vegetarian, it’s become socially acceptable to poke fun at us. Being a vegan, of course, is more like the dietary equivalent of being a transsexual. Acceptance isn’t quite as contagious as it should be.

  I tried being a vegan once. Six months of tempeh and kale and I cracked like a rice cake and inhaled an entire box of fluorescent mac and cheese. It was just too hard for me to keep up the charade of a dairy-free existence. The surprising part was how easy veganism was to enter into. You read enough books that make The Jungle look like Goodnight Moon and you wake up one day to find yourself a recycled-paper-card-carrying member of the tofu mafia. And I knew which books to read, all right.

  My own private Idaho potato went like this: When I was a teenager a renowned South African acupuncturist moved in next door to my parents. He and his wife (who pronounces “lime” like “lamb,” thus leading to an infamous pie recipe debacle) are still the hippest couple my parents know and single-handedly responsible for introducing them to Trader Joe’s and the Fugees. One day I told the acupuncturist I wanted to be a vegetarian. I wish I could remember why I wanted to stop eating meat, but this was high school and I also wish I could remember my motivation for drinking Zima and wearing flannel in public. I took the train into the city to meet with a nutritionist in the acupuncturist’s office. She took my whim far more seriously than I did. She talked about tahini, how to cook vegetables properly, and the semiapocalyptic idea that you could soak almonds for days to make “milk.” That I never tried. But I did buy a cookbook called The Single Vegan. A lifetime later, when I moved into my first apartment in Manhattan, I tried to buy another vegan cookbook—though I was eating cake and cheddar by then—and so I went to a used bookstore in my neighborhood where, oddly, they had only one title in stock: The Single Vegan. It made sense that the only guide to a vegan diet available in an area otherwise known for egg salad and whitefish would focus on the solo eater. The book was filled with lots of tips on eating for one, making barley and carrot pudding last a week. Who would subject their whole family to that?

  Looking back, I should have taken my first encounter with The Single Vegan as a cosmic hint to be less of a high-maintenance eater—the soy cheese always stands alone. Instead I saw myself as this nutritionist woman saw me: a power vegan in the making. I juiced things. Lots of things.

  For a while anyway. Damn you, delicious powdered cheese.

  So that’s my story of how I became a veggie—because I couldn’t hack it as a vegan. Except now I can’t hack it as a vegetarian anymore, either. What can I say? New York is sushi city, and sushi is the one thing I’ve consistently craved over the past decade (besides the secret craving of every vegetarian: bacon). My education about the moral and environmental impact of eating animals is thorough, but my response to all the statistics has developed a major fissure called “sashimi.” At first I started with gateway fish: salmon and tuna. I think it’s because when I pictured them, they were in massive schools where, going against the current of every crunchy article I had ever believed in, I reasoned: Would they really miss just one? Probably more convenient with one less car on the road. And wham: Now I’ll eat eel.

  In my lame pescetarian defense, it’s very hard to be a girl and say you won’t eat something. Refuse one plate of bacon-wrapped pork rinds and you’re an anorexic. Accept them and you’re on Atkins. Excuse yourself to go to the bathroom and you’re bulimic. Best to keep perfectly still and bring an IV of fluids with you to dinner.

  In fact, one of the more interesting results of telling carnivores you used to be a vegan but have switched back to vegetarianism is how much their reaction mirrors that of hard-core vegans. Suddenly you’re caught in between the extremes and not satisfactorily passionate about your diet for either group. Carnivores, like vegans, can become incredulous, trying to find faults in your logic. If I’m going to start eating cheese again, why not eat the cow? How can I eat eggs if I’m not willing to eat the chicken? But instead of being convinced that I should eat the cow, I am once again convinced that I shouldn’t eat the cheese. And all I can think is: You brought out every roadblock you could to keep me from going down this road. You judged, you mocked, you faxed me cartoons. Are you sure you want to encourage me to try again?

  As for other vegetarians, I tell them I started eating sushi because I developed a mercury deficiency. I had to become a pescetarian to save my life. This is a total lie. But it’s a lie that works. Contrary to popular belief, vegetarians aren’t holistic Nazis. They will accept medical betrayal. What they won’t accept is that I got lazy and decided fish were yummy and didn’t have nervous systems complex enough to register pain, and that celebrities like Edward Furlong are freaks for trying to free the lobsters.

  So what’s to become of me now? Like anything that begins on the fringe, vegetarianism is dominated by older adherents who will kick you out of the veggie club faster than you can say “grilled vegetable terrine.” With raw and organic food available in every zip code, we have it easy compared to them. Back in their day they had to walk five miles, uphill both ways, until their Birkenstocks were bloody, just to get a slice of polenta. They are quick to judge and would rather break bread with a veal eater than a nouveau fad vegetarian. I eat with the fishes so life is easy for me all of a sudden. Thus I have opted to keep my mouth shut about my dirty sushi secret.

  The truth is I’m not particularly sure why I don’t eat meat anymore. Any well-educated carnivore could easily thrash me in a debate on the subject—but not dissuade me. Meat (cows, pigs, Bambi) is the final frontier and I can’t bring myself to cross it. Alas, I will continue to attend weddings where I have to politely pull the waiter aside and explain my situation. Without fail the exact same plate returns ten minutes later—a couple of string beans rolling in the juicy outline of a steak. Yes, my proclivity for the chickpea has staying power. And why? Habit. Habit and a stockpile of snarky anticarnivore comebacks.

  Except now I have to be careful not to make them in the company of hard-core vegetarians. It’s more acceptable to tailor your own religion (see this first-date classic: “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in something bigger than ‘us’”) than it is to tailor your own vegetarianism. But if vegetarianism really is some kind of urban faith, this is me throwing my hands together and renewing my vows to vegetables. The words are secondary to the sentiment. Praise be to wheatgrass. Artichoke me with okra and baptize me in beet juice. Juices saves.

  FEVER FAKER

  There are few diseases for which the cure is objectively as bad as the affliction. Cancer is one of them. Crack addiction is another. Lucky for me, I didn’t have either in the summer of 2005. There was no hospital wing or teen docudrama dedicated to my disease. There was no lapel ribbon for what I had. It was something you had to look up and shout twice in a crowded room before you were understood
.

  I was sitting at my desk at work, trying to click my in-box down to a point where I could at least see all my unread e-mails on one screen, when my doctor called. I had gone for my yearly physical the week before. I went to a very good Upper East Side doctor—the kind that gets mentioned in New York magazine more often than not and the kind that has an office with black-and-white pictures on the desk and signed prints on the wall. I remember thinking that it was unnecessarily kind of him to call and let me know that everything was fine with my blood test. What service! God bless him and the HMO that allowed me luxury box seats to my health for the bargain price of twenty dollars.

  “Your iron levels are very high,” he said flatly. “This thing reads like you’ve been chewing spinach in your sleep.”

  It’s hard not to take it literally when medical professionals make analogies. I thought, well, had I? I don’t remember chewing spinach in my sleep. Sounds bad for the jaw. At the very least, I would think it was a choking hazard.

  “But that’s good, no? People take iron supplements.”

  I pictured an army of anemic zombie girls storming my house in the night to steal my iron-rich blood.

  “Well, no, not exactly. Too much iron usually points to a condition called hemochromatosis.” He spelled it out as I scribbled on the back of a business card. “If left untreated it can ruin major organs, lead to heart problems, diabetes, death, etc.”

  What could be less et cetera than death?

  “It often gets caught later in life once heart disease occurs and there’s an abnormally rapid deterioration and no one can figure out why. Usually we say, ‘Aha, she had hemochromatosis.’”

  “If you had a dime…”

  “Exactly. I’m going to send you to a hematologist to be sure.”

  I could feel my heart beating in my teeth. But he was breathtakingly calm. He had gotten good at this over the years. I was like some fuzzy animal and his voice was the pad of a human finger being rubbed over the bridge of my nose.