When I could sleep, my dreams were disaster movies, but waking hours at home were worse. Lisa was leaving a trail of garbage, gum wrappers, and water bottles all over the house. Asked to clean it up, she would explode. Who was this child?
Once she had loved company and watched old videotapes labeled “Family & Friends” until they fell apart. Now she stayed in her room when family and friends came over. It felt as if we’d lost Lisa to a cult or a coven of witches. We could see her, what was left of her, but not touch her. Ned asked, “What should we do now?” What I really wanted was an expert to move into our house and tell us all what to do.
Lisa’s behavior took me back to my own teen years, not a time anybody revisits willingly. The trouble starts when your body changes from the way you’ve always known it to be. One day you’re playing with Barbies, the next you’re wrestling with bras and tampons. You likely put on a little weight with the curves—for me, more weight than curves. And just when your body goes out of control, how you look becomes essential to your being. Some fat is a normal part of adolescent development. But these days, nobody wants that part of being normal.
I went to UC Berkeley in 1968, a tumultuous time when many parents were directing their daughters somewhere safer. But Berkeley came up with so much real life that I needed a lot less comfort from food. By graduation I had grown happier, slimmer, and two inches taller.
Despite my heartening story, as a high school senior Lisa was sure her life was never going to get better, that whatever worked for me meant nothing to her, that she and I had little in common temperamentally or physically. At the time it was true, we were running on different tracks, though food was central to both. Now we were about to collide.
Prom was Saturday, May 3, 2003, in coastal Santa Cruz, the same weekend as the James Beard Foundation Awards, the food world’s biggest honor, in New York. It didn’t look like a problem, because I had no expectations of getting an award. We were just trying to make it day to day. The whole concept of looking forward, that good things could happen in the future, didn’t fit in a house where one of the children was ill. We all had lost the ability to think ahead.
Except for the prom. For that, Lisa had plans.
lisa: I kept studying the pro-anorexia websites. Girls post their pictures and their weights. Many of them are fine and normal, but they call themselves fat and ugly. I felt this way, too. I absorbed their rules, like the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not eat. Thou shalt remain thin. This is where I learned to use a toothbrush for purging instead of my fingers, and to eat lots of soft foods or to drink milk after a binge, to get more of the food out.
I can recall standing in front of my parents’ full-length mirror in a white spaghetti-strap tank top, oversize sweatpants folded over three times at the top, with my twig-like arms drooping at my sides, hip bones sticking out, and staring at myself, saying, “This is good, right? I’m skinny—so skinny, and this is good?!” My head appeared too big on my extremely shrunken frame. Part of me wanted to believe I had reached something amazing with my new emaciated body and the other part of me knew I had landed in dangerous waters.
sheila: The family physician who diagnosed Lisa’s anorexia also referred us to the HMO’s nutrition department, which unlike psychopharmacology held a lot of interest for Lisa. She pored over food labels and diet plans, websites and magazines, and talked about becoming a nutritionist. Prom was four weeks away when Lisa and I went to her first appointment with Karen Astrachan, a clinical dietician who turned out to be a valuable resource even after Lisa stopped seeing her. Astrachan looks like Lisa wanted to look: trim figure, straight blond hair, attractive. Lisa didn’t dismiss her as yet another adult who would never understand. In the dietician’s office, Lisa said that her goal was to stay her current weight for the prom, to gain not one pound.
“After the prom, there will be something else,” Astrachan warned, explaining that another event or reason to stay thin would always come up. She spoke knowledgably and convincingly, but without lecturing or talking down to a very sick teenager.
Astrachan was very likable and Lisa seemed to absorb some of what she said about nutrition. She piled up plastic models of various foods to demonstrate how much it would take to gain even one pound. As she told Lisa how she worked and that she didn’t want Lisa to weigh herself, I thought, “Please, please let this be the person who breaks through.”
lisa: I wanted to go to Karen. I thought she would tell me: “This is the way.” My first question was how I could maintain my weight, especially with prom around the corner. I wanted an exact eating plan. I thought if I ate even a little bit more than I was currently eating, I’d gain weight. Karen said it takes 3,500 calories to gain a pound. She had a basket of toy food to show me: a slice of pizza, a tortilla, a piece of cheese, a bowl of rice, a piece of tofu, a chicken breast, a bowl of cereal, a banana, a piece of bread, a brownie, a scoop of ice cream. She said that she does not do eating plans, that it was my job to figure out what it was my body needed. She recommended that only she weigh me so I would not obsess. She said we would start slow, with added fats, since obviously they were my biggest fear.
I thought it would be easy enough, just six servings of added fats each day. But I couldn’t do it. Adding a tablespoon of peanut butter or a slice of avocado seemed like so much to me.
It felt like all food was bad. I often found myself crying after finishing a sandwich or a small wrap. I was tired all the time and anxious. I was prescribed, with much resistance, Remeron, an antidepressant that would aid in sleep. However, it also increased my appetite. I had to check in with Dr. Stegman again to see if I would have to go on hormones since my estrogen level was getting low.
I knew I needed to gain weight and eat more, and yet I really didn’t want to nor did I want it done artificially, with all these pills. In a way I felt cheated out of my chance to be thin, with doctors telling me I did not have the body type to support a low weight. I had spent the majority of my important preteen and high school years overweight and self-conscious and now I had finally seized control, able to be labeled in the “skinny” category. Why did it have to be taken away? I wanted to stay this weight and still be normal. But I didn’t feel normal. All my focus on restricting calories and exercising in turn caused my attention span to be swarmed by thoughts of food. The less I ate, the more I thought about it. My mind was in a constant state of negotiation. I would try to study but the rumbling in my stomach grew louder and my mental debate worsened: “Should I have an apple? No. Be strong. Just finish this homework and then you can have an apple.” But in the end I didn’t do the homework or eat the apple.
I started having anxiety attacks, especially at the end of the day when my blood sugar was at its lowest. I constantly tried on certain clothes to make sure they were either still too big or fit a certain way. I checked my face in the mirror when it seemed bigger. I would complain to my parents that I was ballooning up. They would tell me I was crazy, and that I wasn’t seeing things clearly. They would say, “What I see is a very skinny girl.”
sheila: Did we really tell Lisa she was crazy? It’s possible. We were not in the running for Parents of the Year.
With a year like ours, I hadn’t even thought to look when the Beard nominations email went out. But my colleagues did, and there was my name, attached to the long-winded award category: Newspaper Feature Writing About Restaurants and/or Chefs with or without Recipes.
The James Beard awards are the Oscars of the food world. For chefs, cookbook authors, restaurant owners as well as food writers and TV show hosts, the Beards are the big leagues.
I was nominated for my story “Serve You Right: Caring for Diners Is a Learnable Art.” I was proud of this story, which had grown out of an experience with good service one night with friends. The server had picked up on Diane’s disappointment with her entrée, asked her about it, and taken care of it with absolute efficiency. What struck me was how rarely this happens, unless you’re in a very expensive restau
rant, and even there, you can feel uncomfortably full of attention overkill. In good economies and bad, service is always the number one complaint among diners. I had heard so many horrors that I had to wonder how a restaurant ever got it right, so I went about asking owners, servers, and customers why they thought service, though so important, was mostly flubbed and what were the steps to correct that, for diners as well as restaurants. Bad service spoils the best food. The point was that diners want to feel that some hunger—for nourishment, hospitality, community, or entertainment—has been satisfied by the time they’ve paid for dinner.
The journalism awards were to be given at a banquet in New York City on Friday, May 2—the night before the prom.
lisa: The day Mike asked me to the prom, I happened to have one of my worst breakdowns so far. I hadn’t expect to be asked. I had never been asked to any dance ever in my high school career. I had been to many dances, but I had either gone stag or with a group of friends.
Mike was in a band with my friend’s boyfriend. I thought he was cute.
My last class of the day was physics, and for months I’d been having extreme difficulty holding it together for that hour. Whether because of six hours of various other draining classes, or low blood sugar, or just because it was physics, it had become my hour of doom. This day, I spent most of the class with my head buried in my arms, folded across the desk. My friend Gaelin did her best to talk me through, and when the class got let out, I felt like running to safety but could barely lift my head. All I could do was shuffle out, like a very old woman. I just wanted to go home, hoping to find some solace in front of the TV.
But Mike was waiting for me. Standing with his hands nervously tucked at his side, he called to me quietly, “Hey, Lisa . . . um, I wanted to ask you to the prom.” He extended his hand, which held a single rose.
My eyes fixed on the rose for a second. It seemed so lonely and almost hopeless, like me. And yet, somehow endearing.
My mind was in so many places, it took some time to process his proposition. Finally I lifted my head enough to meet his eyes and slipped out a yes. Then, I don’t know why, I fell into an awkward hug with him and whispered, “Thank you.”
I drove home to tell Mom the good news.
sheila: How could I go to New York? Fly across the country for an award I had only a one-third chance of getting, dine like a celebrity, and gad about at cocktail parties? A month earlier I’d canceled a trip to Washington, DC, where Ned had a conference, because both of us couldn’t be that far from Lisa at the same time. We hadn’t even gone to visit nearby friends for a weekend. Canceling had been the right thing to do then, and maybe was the right thing now.
But how could I not go? I’d never been nominated before, and may never be again. Besides the journalism awards banquet, the rest of the weekend, through Monday night, offered chances to meet the luminaries of my field. And there were panel discussions at the renowned Institute of Culinary Education. New York Times writer R. W. Apple would be moderating an exchange with cookbook author Marion Cunningham, Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, and Judith Jones, the editor who discovered Julia Child and Anne Frank. These legends of food writing do not pass through my town on their way to San Francisco.
The Monday night gala also has its legendary aspects. Like the Oscars, the Beards always run far too long. For years the food awards were held in a vertical ant colony, the Times Square Marriott Marquis. (In 2007 the fete moved to Lincoln Center.) Two thousand attendees warmed their auditorium seats for four hours, then streamed into another windowless ballroom, set up like the world’s tastiest trade show. As a restaurant critic I had been a regional judge for the restaurant awards, which got me a ticket to the gala every year. This time, Ned could go, too.
If you want to go and you’re not a member of the James Beard Foundation, no problem. What you get for $450 a head are fine wines matched to dishes made by world-famous chefs who stand there cooking and chatting. The food is fancy, but not necessarily the behavior. Go back for three servings of Hudson Valley Foie Gras with Caramelized Three-Pear Salad. Who’s going to know? As at a theme park, strangers swap suggestions about which culinary ride is worth standing in line for, and which to skip. There are very few tables, and if you sit down you might miss something. The 2003 awards marked the centenary of James Beard’s birth, with celebrity chefs including Daniel Boulud, Jacques Torres, Suzanne Goin, Jacques Pepin, and Andre Soltner. Wines would be poured by Cakebread, Far Niente, Domaine Drouin Oregon, and a dozen other top-notch wineries.
It would be fun. Are you allowed to have fun when your child is sick? Could there be circumstances that permit enthusiasm? Doubtful, but in thinking about it I remembered maxims of motherhood, such as: Children would always rather have you committing suicide in the next room than enjoying yourself away from them. And who can forget this one: You are only as happy as your most unhappy child. In the twenty-two years since our first child was born, the usual work-family conflicts had come up. Ned had a meeting so couldn’t get to the daycare center by 5:30 when they closed, but I had a deadline. Jacob or Lisa was sick—whose work could be done at home or whose boss was more understanding of childcare issues? But now, Lisa was always sick. Ned and I had eliminated most everything in our lives other than work that wasn’t about her care, but she wasn’t getting any better.
How could I go to New York? Lisa was very fragile and the prom was so important to her. I felt guilty about her whole life, way beyond the prom, that she had come to this sickness. I was also furious. All those years, focusing on the kids. In the past two years I’d done research, made appointments, stuck by Lisa’s bedside, and instead of getting better she had turned our home into a forcefield of fear and dread. She didn’t want to be sick. No one would choose to live this way. We know depression runs in the family, so certain genes stacked up against her, but the trigger wasn’t obvious. What part of it was my fault? Did I not applaud enough when she needed it, or did I applaud too much and let her feel entitled to endless praise? My job surely didn’t help; we talked about food all the time. Still, I felt manipulated and rotten for feeling that way. Children force us to be generous. No question, my kids made me a better person. But not perfect. If I didn’t go to New York, I might file it at the top of my Sacrifices Made for Children list and hold it against Lisa forever. Ned was dying to go, too. For him, it was the Super-bowl. We decided to change his ticket, so he could fly back Saturday to be there when Lisa got home from the prom. Jake and my cousin Peggy would be there till then.
lisa: During the weeks leading up to the prom, I still couldn’t sleep. I kept setting goals for myself, like to be better by this date or try to eat an added fat with dinner, but every date passed and fats were left out. Prom was my new goal. Then Mom got this great news and I felt like shit. Her James Beard-award nomination meant she would have to fly to New York for a few days—and that just happened to be the same weekend as the prom. I didn’t think I could do it.
Without her, how was I going to prepare for the biggest night I would have in a long, long time? Dad was going with her. I felt abandoned. Every mother loves to be there when her daughter goes off to her senior prom, and Dad was supposed to pep-talk my date to make sure he would treat me well and get me home safe. They weren’t going to be there to take group pictures and hundreds of pictures of me, until I got sick of smiling and yelled, “That’s enough! I’m leaving now!”
They weren’t even going to be there to embarrass me.
sheila: I didn’t even go to my high school prom. In 1968, I wasn’t the only one in the country who skipped the prom. What with Vietnam War protests, the continuing Soviet nuclear threat, and the assassination that spring of Martin Luther King Jr., the prom seemed silly. But in my town, debutante balls were big deals and so was the prom. Two boys asked me to go. Two boys even nerdier than me, and I was the frizzy-haired editor of the school newspaper. No way was I going to be stuck for a very long evening in uncomfortable clothes with either of them. I’d rather stay home
and watch Rocky & Bullwinkle, and would still today.
At some point in the evolution of social etiquette between Lisa’s generation and mine, high school kids smartened up about proms. Now they go in groups, and their dates are often friends. During prom season, you see a lot of rented limos seating ten or twelve very dressed-up high school kids. They don’t stand around with one person all night. Prom is still a very big deal, maybe even bigger because just about everybody goes. Rituals include pre-prom photo shoots and dinner for the parents, and intricately planned after-parties. Girls pour energy into hair and makeup, but the really big thing is the dress.
lisa: The dress I decided on was the only one that could really work with my body. My butt had been exercised into oblivion, and I had lost any sign of female curves. On one of many scouting trips to the mall, I found a black Jessica McClintock gown, with layers of lace and chiffon, and an empire waist decorated with a maroon rose on the right side. It ended just above my ankles. In the dressing room I discovered the dress had perfect “twirlability.” For the short time I spent in that dress in that fitting room, I felt pretty.
But that was a month before the prom. I was supposed to be gaining weight. Would it still fit?
sheila: In the best of times, I am a terrible shopper. But that’s only one of the Mom skills I flunked. Hair was another. My method is wash and let dry, while Lisa collected ribbons and barrettes, and wanted her hair twisted into a French braid. She had to show me what she was talking about. My ideas for Lisa’s birthday parties lacked the pizzazz she sought, and I was not the soul of patience when other kids came over. Ned baked the cakes.
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