Born Round Read online

  “I pray for next Christmas,” she’d tell whoever happened to be on the phone at the moment when she was catching a breath between those sobs, and what she meant was that she was praying she’d be around, because she was sure the chances were slim. Her conviction was unshaken by the fact that she’d survived what was by this point at least a decade of such predictions. She wasn’t about to surrender the drama of it all.

  After the call it was off to Remington’s, where we always had the same waiter and always shocked him by how much we ordered: the bowls of bisque; the hunks of meat; the potatoes, slathered with sour cream; onion rings, deep-fried; corn, just scraped off the cob; ice cream. It was Christmas Eve! A time for unbound revelry!

  Mark and Harry would dig in to the feast with every bit as much enthusiasm as Dad and I did. They were Brunis, after all, attuned to the imperative of going overboard on special occasions, and when they chose to, they could just about keep pace with Dad and me. They just didn’t have my habit of bingeing in between these big nights, my way of turning everyday eating into a warped science experiment.

  By both swimming and playing water polo at Amherst, Mark was staying in decent shape. He’d get a little chunky one semester, then wouldn’t be chunky at all the next. But he was only barely conscious of these fluctuations. He had his girlfriends, he had his fraternity mates, he was easily getting Bs and As in his courses: Why worry about anything else? A mirror was what you consulted when you had to shave or comb your hair. Otherwise, there wasn’t much cause to look into it for long.

  Harry was getting buff. Over the course of high school his interests had moved well beyond Star Trek, and as those interests expanded to include girls, he decided to put more muscle on what had been a slender, unimposing frame. Around the time Mom and Dad moved to La Jolla, he’d started lifting weights. In the La Jolla garage, which Mom and Dad never used, he set up a gym of free weights and inclined boards for sit-ups, and he spent hours there on holiday and summer breaks from school. He set a fitness goal of passing the grueling physical test required to work as a public beach lifeguard in La Jolla. And he indeed passed it, doing that job for a summer during which his skin turned bronzer than it ever had—both he and Mark, unlike me, could tan—and his hair turned blond.

  Mark sometimes joined Harry in the garage gym, but I didn’t. I found it too dark and depressing. I also knew I’d never manage even half as many sit-ups as they did, and I knew each of them would cock an eyebrow at the other as they watched me struggle. So I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Instead I’d head down to Mexico, where I’d found my own, different antidote to the Remington’s munch.

  In addition to its ocean breezes, gorgeous sunsets and seemingly limitless reserves of guacamole, San Diego had the virtue of proximity to Tijuana. I’d made it a point to head there on one of my first visits to La Jolla, because I’d heard that in Mexico the kinds of drugs that required a prescription in the U.S. could be bought over the counter. I dipped into a pharmacy and asked for diet pills, not sure what I’d get but certain that it was at least worth trying. The ones the pharmacist gave me were small and yellow and—woooooeeeee!!!—made my scalp tingle and my heart thump faster and louder. They were speed, pure and simple. I remembered it from high school, and I put it to renewed good use, stocking up on the pills whenever I visited La Jolla and could make my way south of the border.

  Back at Carolina, I’d take one in the late afternoon or early evening, on a day when I’d eaten little or nothing, so that I could quiet my hunger and simultaneously summon the energy for a four-mile run.

  If I did this just two or three days a week, I balanced out the overeating on other days. At one point toward the end of my junior year, I jammed my way into size 33 pants. I’d been up to 35 that first summer at Newsweek.

  Thank you, my Mexican speed! I love you, my Mexican speed!

  But I was wary of it, and not just because I knew that it wasn’t going to serve as a permanent solution to my eating and weight problems, that it wasn’t a viable, or at least sensible, long-term strategy. I was wary of its side effects in real time. I had to develop and abide by certain guidelines for my Mexican speed.

  GUIDELINE ONE: Do not take it on a day of heavy coffee drinking. If I did, I noticed that the scalp tingling became, instead, a burning, flushing sensation suffusing the entirety of my cranium: what I imagined a hot flash would be. I had to take deep breaths, splash cold water on my face, close my eyes, say a calming mantra, ride it out. My heart seemed not merely to beat but to do jumping jacks in my chest.

  GUIDELINE TWO: Do not take it after nine p.m. I enjoyed nighttime runs—enjoyed the sense of no one getting a good look at me as I lumbered down the road, love handles jiggling—and was indeed temped to do this. But I learned my lesson fast. My Mexican speed didn’t just quit when I wanted it to and couldn’t be dissipated with a concentrated burst of activity. It lingered, and so there was the risk of being bright-eyed and bouncy at three a.m. My close friend Nancy, with whom I lived off campus during both my junior and senior years, could always tell when I’d taken my Mexican speed too late in the evening. The apartment would be miraculously clean the next morning, because I’d take to vacuuming floors and scrubbing counters in the dead of night, just to channel, and get rid of, my extra energy.

  Me (upper right) with my parents and siblings at Remington’s

  on Christmas Eve. The Mexican speed is working.

  GUIDELINE THREE: Do not take it on a stomach that feels volatile, or after spicy food, or after large quantities of cheese or milk, if it’s to be followed by a vigorous run. Certain urgent needs could present themselves during that run. Certain involuntary, convulsive and exceedingly embarrassing things could happen.

  So I followed my guidelines, paced myself and reassured myself that this was a healthier alternative to throwing up. It was also just a temporary measure, intended to whip me into a state of fitness and thinness so rewarding I would discover the discipline to maintain it without any pharmacological assistance. My Mexican speed would get me there.

  My Mexican speed, that is, and my Metamucil. I noticed Metamucil in a drugstore during my senior year and I read the packaging, which identified it as a gentle, “natural” laxative. Maybe, I thought, this was what I should have been using instead of Ex-Lax. And maybe it was something I should use now, a way not of falling back into old habits but of resurrecting whatever good there had been in them while steering clear of the bad. I started buying Metamucil or Fiberall, both fiber-rich, orange-colored powders that dissolved—less thoroughly than one might hope—in water. And I started drinking these grainy concoctions regularly, though never too close to the time when I might take some of my Mexican speed and go out for a run.

  I berated myself: Why hadn’t I paid attention to fiber before? Fiber was obviously crucial, and fiber was going to save me. By making sure there was an unusually high concentration of fiber in my system, I’d feel too full to overeat, and anything I did eat would be digested too quickly to become fat. I deemed this science no less compelling for the fact that I’d more or less invented it.

  With fiber as my focus, I ate the following dinner, night after night: a sludgy glass of three times the recommended dosage of orange Metamucil or Fiberall and four pieces of toasted Branola bread, slathered with low-cholesterol Shedd’s Spread, a pathetic butter imposter marketed as less fattening.

  The ritual appalled Nancy but also amused her.

  “Your dad called,” she announced one night when I came in from a late run.

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “He has some business trip near here,” she answered, “and he said he wanted to come into town and take us to dinner. He asked me about restaurants. He asked me what your favorite food was.”

  She paused, clearly for effect.

  “I told him,” she continued, “that he should just mix you some Metamucil and toast you some Branola. I apologize: I forgot about the Shedd’s Spread.”

  Of course she h
adn’t said that, and when he came he took us to the nicest French restaurant in town. We had steak au poivre—the portion, he and I both noted, wasn’t anything like the one at Remington’s—and roasted duck. We had chocolate mousse.

  It was a terrific meal, and I relished it for a while before ruing it for a whole lot longer. The next afternoon I took a little yellow pill and a four-mile run. And hours after that I ate a dinner of Metamucil, Branola and Shedd’s Spread, though I applied the Shedd’s Spread in a portion much more stinting than usual.

  The fiber got boring. The speed, like the throwing up, started to scare me. But I wasn’t out of ideas, not nearly. I had this theory that repetitive eating was potentially dietetic eating: that if I ate the same abbreviated spectrum of things over and over again, my body would become so practiced at digesting them that they would be less fattening than their caloric equivalents. It was a reprise and refinement of my vegetarian logic, and was seductive in part because it suited me so well. Unlike most other people I knew, I could consume a boring, set meal—Branola toast with orange-flavored Metamucil, for example—day after day and night after night for weeks on end.

  And that’s what I often did on my first trip to Europe, which I took shortly after my graduation from Carolina. In a land of thrilling culinary traditions and vibrant produce, I subsisted for a period on bread alone. In an eater’s paradise, I elected a purgatory of feta and tomato followed by tomato and feta.

  I was in Europe on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Morehead Foundation, a reward, given to most of the Morehead scholars, for finishing school with a respectable grade point average and for completing prior Morehead-related summer activities and internships with distinction (the foundation didn’t know about Mary Tyler Moore). To get the money you just had to come with up with an edifying script and educational justification for your proposed journey, and mine was this: I was going to trace, loosely, the voyages of Aeneas as described in The Aeneid. The plan reflected—or, rather, was superimposed on—my desires to visit Italy and Greece. To make the proposal credible I threw Tunisia into the mix, because that was where Aeneas had shacked up with Dido, lighting her fire (somewhat too literally, as it were).

  Although Aeneas had hit Greece before Italy, I wanted to proceed in the opposite order, and couldn’t see the harm in rewriting his itinerary ever so slightly. Although Aeneas had never made it up to Florence or Venice, at least not according to my research, I decided that those cities were spiritually of a piece with his other stops and could in good conscience be visited. I began my adventure in Venice and went from there to Florence and then to Rome, by which point I realized I had to find some remedy for all the spaghetti alla carbonara, bucatini all’amatriciana, pizza and gelato I’d been consuming, some method for managing Italy from that point forward. The one I adopted was born in part of penury, or at least thrift.

  To save money, I limited my dinner one night to a variety of breads purchased from a brick-oven bakery in Rome. I loved them all, the crunchy and the soft breads, the salty buns and the rolls flecked with seeds, and so I went back to the same brick-oven bakery the next night and got another array of bread. The bread was all I ate, no cheese or meat or butter or oil on it.

  The morning after, my stomach felt emptier than usual, and my jeans were loose. Was I on to something here? Sure, I had walked at least ten miles each of the previous days—from the Baths of Caracalla to Saint Peter’s; up and down Via del Corso and Via Venti Settembre and Via Veneto—and that might have a little something to do with my feeling of newfound litheness. But I was crediting the bread. I was crediting a virtually no-fat, monochromatic meal that must have been a breeze to digest.

  So I did an all-bread lunch the next day, followed by an all-bread dinner. And I just kept on going like that, for at least a week. I made just one alteration, adding beer to the nightly routine. I figured beer, like bread, was made from grain, so I was essentially drinking bread while I ate bread and keeping the meal both fat-free and confined to a strictly limited group of ingredients. A strictly limited group of nutrients, too. Halfway through the week, I began to experience periodic moments of dizziness. By week’s end the moments weren’t so periodic, and I was forced to acknowledge the good sense of an occasional hunk of mozzarella or bite of veal saltimbocca. Bread couldn’t give a body all that it needed.

  But could Greek salads? That’s what I ate, meal after meal, in Athens and on Santorini and on Mykonos. For the classics scholars now crying foul, I admit I had no proof Aeneas docked on Mykonos, nothing I could point to in the historical or literary records. But it’s a beautiful island and a crazy amount of fun, and Aeneas sailed the seas nearby. He surely would have hit Mykonos, if the weather had been right and the winds had been advantageous and there had been half-price cocktails during happy hour at Super Paradise Beach that day. I felt certain of it.

  The Greek salad in our country tends to get distracted with vapid and unnecessary lettuce. But in its birthplace it sticks for the most part to juicy cucumbers and juicier tomatoes and a sheep’s worth of feta, which isn’t crumbled but presented in thick rectangular slabs. If there are olives, they’re dark and robust. It’s as much a cheese and crudité plate as it is an actual salad, and if it’s large enough, it can definitely pass for a meal.

  I made sure it did and, during about three weeks in Greece, ate at least two dozen Greek salads. I washed them down with Dutch, Belgian or Italian beer. There weren’t any Greek beers to speak of, and retsina and ouzo weren’t my thing.

  The Greek salads served me well. Near the beginning of my week on Mykonos I spent a night with a good-looking Scotsman from Glasgow; toward the end of it I spent two nights with an even better looking Frenchman from Lyon. My good fortune didn’t go to my head: when the Frenchman suggested, in between those two nights, that I accompany him to the nude gay beach on the island, I made a slew of excuses—shopping to do, clothes to wash, postcards to write, a hard-to-get appointment with a local oracle to attend—and told him to enjoy himself, though not too much. I wasn’t about to disrobe in public in the bright Mediterranean sun, even though all the walking and monochromatic eating I’d been doing since Rome had definitely reduced my weight.

  Which was . . . what?

  As always, I didn’t know, and as always, I didn’t want to find out. I had my guesses, based on the one or two times over the past four years when curiosity—or dread—had got the better of me and I had tentatively stepped on a scale. I was no doubt somewhere in my usual 180-to-195-pound range, and likely toward the bottom of it. I certainly wasn’t the 177 pounds that those medical charts said a five-foot, eleven-inch man—I was now nearly that tall—should be, because I’d never managed that. Maybe that’s what I’d been right after Outward Bound, but I hadn’t checked then, too fearful of disappointment.

  And I wasn’t going to check now. I preferred not knowing. I preferred assuming from the attentions of the Scotsman and the Frenchman that whatever the number, it was low enough not to be an embarrassment, though surely higher than it should be.

  “I think Jill Eikenberry is just terrific,” Mom said. “Don’t you?”

  “She’s fine,” I answered, taking another bite of one of the avocado and Cheddar sandwiches we often had for lunch in La Jolla. We got them from a sandwich shop just six blocks away. “But I’m more of a Susan Dey person.”

  “And if I’d singled out Susan Dey, you would have gone with Jill Eikenberry, because you always have to contradict me,” Mom said, sounding genuinely wounded. She was right that I liked to contradict her, wrong that I could switch positions so easily on this particular matter. For one thing, I took L.A. Law very seriously. For another, Susan Dey was a prior Partridge who had reportedly had an eating disorder, wore her blond hair in a sleek cut, and was involved onscreen with Harry Hamlin. Jill Eikenberry wore her hair in a blandly voluminous style and bestowed her affections, in both the show and real life, on a short, balding mensch. There wasn’t any contest here.

  I was bac
k in La Jolla, having decided to hang out there for the eight months between the end of my European travels and the start of journalism graduate school at Columbia University in New York in the fall of 1987. Mom had taped all the L.A. Law episodes I’d missed while in Europe. And as I caught up on them, she watched them a second time, if not a third. When she loved something, she loved it passionately and without any possibility of boredom, whether it was the prose stylings of Sidney Sheldon; Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume, which became as essential to California Mom as Guerlain’s Shalimar had been to Connecticut Mom; linguine with a basil and pine nut pesto, her default pasta dish of this particular period; or the legal and romantic melodrama performed by Jill Eikenberry and Susan Dey, among other actors and actresses, on L.A. Law.

  We tended to watch the videotapes at lunchtime, because my days were free until about four p.m., when I would head to a French bistro where I’d landed a job waiting tables. It served the smoothest, creamiest chocolate mousse I’d ever tasted, and every time I hustled to the kitchen to drop an order ticket, I stopped en route to steal a gigantic spoonful of it from the refrigerator along the path. I caromed between the tables in the dining room with mousse on my breath. I went home at night with mousse coming out of my pores.

  Mom and Dad would be asleep by then, but Adelle would usually be up. She was in high school, and the hours between eleven p.m. and one a.m. were crucial telephone time, though she’d sometimes take a five- or ten-minute break between calls to acknowledge my existence and ask me for a bit of advice, sometimes something involving guys and sex. Mom had taken it upon herself to clue Adelle, too, into my sexuality. (In fact the only close family member Mom shied away from telling—and I was glad for this—was Grandma.) Adelle treated the news as an interesting opportunity. She wasn’t about to let an older gay brother—and any knowledge about dealing with men that he might have picked up—go to waste.