Born Round Read online

  “Thursday,” you say, “could work.”

  But can it?

  It’s eight p.m. You took a run at six thirty p.m. But you ran only 2.5 miles, because you just weren’t feeling it. You should have run another two. You will run another two. You get back into shorts and a T-shirt, grab your Walkman, rewind the mix tape with the Psychedelic Furs and Madonna, and off you go. You do the same 2.5 miles all over again.

  In the morning you feel lighter. You feel like helium! You skip breakfast and you gnaw on an apple and a pear for lunch and you’re feeling a bit woozy by the time you get out of work. When you factor that into the stiffness you feel from running twice the previous night, you decide against another run. You don’t need it tonight. Your calorie count for the day is tiny. You just need to keep any eating before bedtime to a minimum. You’ll just make a salad or something.

  When you get home you realize there’s nothing in the fridge. You’re too tired and lazy to go out, so you treat this as an opportunity: you’re done eating for the day. And what a net-loss day it’s been, or will be. Just two pieces of fruit.

  By nine forty-five p.m. you’re crazy starving. All you can think about is how empty your stomach is. It’s so empty it’s forlorn. Angry. Your stomach seems to have its own range of emotions, all negative and needy.

  You call your favorite pizza delivery place and order the smallest pizza, which isn’t really that small, but you resolve not to eat the whole of it, then do.

  And then it’s Thursday. Dear God, it’s Thursday.

  You call an editor at work to say you have an important personal errand and will be in late. You say this in a tentative, embarrassed, please-don’t-pry voice, eliminating any chance you’ll be asked what the errand is. The errand is a run. You have to take a last-ditch run.

  You do, and you overdress for extra sweating. Then, at work, you’re turkey-sandwich virtuous at lunchtime. At about three thirty you go into the bathroom. You look in the mirror. You’re wearing khakis, and you’ll surely find something darker in your closet for the evening. You’re wearing a button-down chosen more for comfort than midriff flattery. But still. You don’t look thin, and you’re not going to look thin in four hours, with a change of clothes.

  You suck in your gut. It does not produce as striking an effect as you had hoped.

  You call his home number, not his work number, because it’s easier to tell a lie to a machine.

  “I can’t believe this and I can’t tell you how bummed I am about it, but I’ve been sneezing all afternoon and I can feel that my head’s really stuffed up,” you say. You’re using the clogged-nose voice just about anyone can affect when necessary. You’re hoping yours doesn’t sound too fake. “I think I’m getting sick, and I’d hate to get you sick.” No, no! That last part was too much. It could be read as a presumptuous assertion that major germs would be exchanged.

  You can’t go back and delete the words, so you forge ahead. “As much as I hate to kick this too far into the future,” you conclude, “I guess we’ll have to wait until you get back into town. Let’s touch base then.”

  That night you join friends at a Middle Eastern restaurant, where you set world records for hummus consumption. No reason to diet tonight. Any rescheduled date is more than two weeks away.

  They’re a relatively disciplined two weeks: Frequent runs. Infrequent binges. You don’t shed four to five pounds, but it’s possible you shed two.

  You think, If he calls, I’ll go out with him. Whichever night he suggests. No chickening out.

  But you leave it to him to call. His call is the necessary proof that he’s interested enough to overlook your physical flaws. His call is the reassurance you need.

  What a surprise: it never comes.

  Somehow, some way, thanks to unpredictable bursts of determination and unexpected stretches of levelheadedness, I did manage to date, and my desire for those dates to go well—along with my hope for additional dates beyond them—kept me in decent shape. It propelled me out to Belle Isle for long runs. It helped prevent binges too frequent or florid.

  But I achieved actual, indisputable slimness only twice, and in neither case did the credit belong to better habits or more rationally marshaled willpower. It belonged to a minor war and a major athletic endeavor.

  A few days after Christmas 1990, the newspaper sent me to Saudi Arabia to write about soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines who were there in preparation for the first Gulf War. I arrived in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, in time for New Year’s Eve with the troops, and stayed for nearly three months.

  Using my hotel room as a base, I’d take day trips and overnight trips out into the desert, near the border of southern Iraq, to spend as much time as military officials would let me interviewing the men camped out there. I’d sleep the way they slept, on hard cots inside tents, and eat the way they’d eat, which often meant those prepackaged, processed wonders known as Meals Ready-to-Eat. MREs were designed to provide maximum calories with minimum substance. They were compact energy bombs for soldiers on the go, with envelopes of rice stews or ham slabs or meat-flecked gruels. I was horrified, and not on epicurean grounds. I couldn’t believe I was having extra-fattening food forced on me, especially when I was doing nothing more aerobic than scribbling in a notepad and banging on a laptop.

  It was food so charmless that even I couldn’t get through more than about half of an MRE a day. And when military officials finally permitted me more than overnight trips, assigning me to a cavalry regiment positioned along the tall sand berm separating northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq, MREs were the sum and summary of my diet. I picked at them joylessly as I waited for the ground war to begin.

  When it did, I was given an empty seat in the rear of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that had four soldiers inside, instead of the usual five. Our regiment was on the leading edge of troops moving into Iraq, and I might have been petrified had I not been too cramped, knotted and achy to feel anything else. A Bradley Fighting Vehicle isn’t designed with such niceties as leg room and lumbar support in mind. It’s a heavily fortified steamer trunk on wheels, with more room for armaments than anything else. I sat with my knees against my chest and my head banging against the low, hard ceiling. My only view of the landscape was through a small, smudgy rectangle of bulletproof glass. It was like watching Lawrence of Arabia on a microscope slide.

  I ate less than ever as we trundled toward whatever awaited us, my appetite killed by my discomfort and something else: a determination not to go to the bathroom much. Because of the Army’s concern about land mines, we were forbidden to step out of the vehicle, which didn’t have a toilet of any kind. The solution was to lower the Bradley’s rear hatch, crouch on its far edge and aim for the desert floor. I didn’t have the thigh muscles for it. Or the immodesty.

  We drove across the desert for five days without seeing combat, then got the news that the ground war was over. Brief as this trek was, it thinned me even further than my prior months in Saudi Arabia had, and when Renee met me at the Detroit airport in mid-March, she jokingly wondered if I’d been away at a spa. I suggested we head straight for a pub that had an oversize cheeseburger I loved. I’d never found a decent burger in Saudi Arabia and figured I was due and could afford one, calorically speaking.

  Many months and more than a few regained pounds later one of my editors asked me if I’d be willing to pedal a bicycle across the breadth of Michigan. The newspaper was a principal sponsor of a group ride that publicized the Rails-to-Trails project, a campaign to turn train tracks that were no longer being used into bicycle routes. To chronicle the bikers’ adventures on the first annual ride, the newspaper had sent a fit staffer along for the six-day trek from the edge of Lake Michigan eastward to Detroit.

  For the second annual ride, the newspaper needed a new staff recruit for the assignment. The editor who approached me knew that I was a regular runner. Was I also, by chance, a biker? I wasn’t, my emulation of Jennifer Beals having been brief and long ago. But I was i
n my late twenties and in decent cardiovascular health, and the ride was still three weeks away. I’d get a bicycle and I’d train. No problem.

  Right away I got the bicycle, a clunky-looking one suited for off-road biking, because much of the ride entailed that. As for the training, well, I got sidetracked. I went out for a ride around Belle Isle, but found that I didn’t enjoy biking as much as running, so the next day I went back to what I liked. I reasoned that as long as I was exercising and staying in shape, the method didn’t matter. Besides, while the cross-state ride averaged about forty-five miles a day, I would have most of the day to do it. I could take my time.

  As it happened I had to be slightly more attentive to speed than other riders did, because while they simply had to make it to a given night’s base camp by dinnertime, I had to be there by three thirty p.m. so that I could write and file a story by six p.m. But that would still give me a good six hours to cover the requisite distance if I started out by nine a.m.

  On the first day of the ride, it took me less than five hours to do the fifty miles or so, some of it across dirt and grass rather than pavement. On the second day, it took me only slightly longer, because I stopped more frequently for breaks. At various points along the route, the organizers set up refueling stations stocked with drinks and cookies, and I found I could eat seven or eight cookies without feeling at all stuffed. My body just burned them up. This was heaven.

  On the third day, I woke up, began to get out of my bed in the school dormitory that riders were using, and shrieked. I couldn’t straighten my legs. When I tried, my knees felt like they were being stabbed. I sat on the bed and breathed deeply, hoping this was just some postsleep stiffness. How could it be from the biking, which hadn’t felt difficult at all?

  I tried a second time to straighten my legs. This time I whimpered instead of shrieking, not because the agony was any less intense but because some pride had kicked in.

  With halting movements I finally managed to get out of bed, get dressed and make my way outside, where I found one of the ride’s organizers. He wondered how much bicycling I’d done in advance of the ride. When I told him I’d stuck to running, he remarked that the bicycling was stressing and straining a different set of muscles and joints, which were now voicing their complaint.

  He reminded me of a truck that followed us from stop to stop and said I could ride in it, with my bicycle in the back. This would have been an excellent solution, but for one small problem: I’d already charted my journey and my thoughts in the newspaper for two days running, establishing a ritual of daily chronicles. If I stopped riding now, I’d have to own up to my failure to hundreds of thousands of readers.

  One of my fellow riders had some ibuprofen. I took four of them for starters, and another two every two hours thereafter. And I biked. At first I biked as slowly as a human being could without tumbling sideways or going backward. Each time I pressed a pedal down, it seemed to me that shards of broken glass were scraping the inside of my knee, and I had to clench my jaw to get through it. On any incline of more than about three degrees, I got off the bike and pushed it forward. I started composing paragraphs for that day’s story in my head and tried to memorize them. At the pace I was riding, I wasn’t going to get to the next base camp by three thirty, so I was going to have to type like the wind.

  By the end of that day I was doing much better, my agony eased by some combination of ibuprofen, vanquished stiffness and pure will. By the end of the next day I was, miraculously, close to fine. I completed the ride, all 250 miles of it, going so fast on the last day of it that I glided across the finish line well before the vast majority of other riders. I felt lighter than usual, but was actually less focused on that than on how much prouder than usual I felt. Sometimes I could grit things out. Sometimes I surprised myself.

  Ten

  The thrill of unusual adventures like my captivity in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or my stupidity in biking across Michigan had a lot to do with sharing them with Mom. It felt like a proper return on the investment she’d made in us.

  “I would have just held it in,” she said when I told her how I’d had to go to the bathroom in the Iraq desert during the truncated ground war, at least the one time I couldn’t avoid it. “I would have. For days if necessary!”

  Regarding my Biker’s Knees, she said, “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad. You’ve always been a big baby about pain.” She wasn’t one of those mothers who rushed a child to the doctor at the sound of the slightest sneeze or kept him home from school if his temperature was just 99.8. She stuck a few aspirin in him, told him to buck up, sent him on his way and went back to the grocery store. She was always going back to the grocery store.

  I reminded her of her unwarranted skepticism in the past. “Remember when I broke my back,” I said, “and you didn’t believe me?”

  “I knew you’d bring that up,” she said. “You always bring that up! You think I’m just the most terrible mother. Fine: I’m a terrible mother!”

  I hadn’t technically broken my back, but during my years at Loomis, after jumping from a classmate’s tree house rather than climbing down, I’d experienced twinges and stiffness a few inches above my tailbone. When I informed Mom, she was convinced I was making it up to get out of an upcoming swim meet that I’d already said I didn’t want to go to. Weeks later, when the twinges got markedly worse and I found myself walking in herky-jerky steps, Mom at last decided we should consult an orthopedist, who did a special kind of X-ray called a bone scan. It turned out that I had fractured two vertebrae. I spent the next three months in a canvas and steel brace that went from my pelvis nearly to my underarms and kept my lower back from bending.

  From college forward, my phone calls to Mom had been frequent, but while living in Detroit I called her just about every day, the two of us having our morning coffee together over the phone, the calls lasting up to an hour. I never cut them short. If she seemed to be enjoying them, I didn’t want to disrupt that, and if she was filling me in on the latest news from her doctors, I wanted to hear it—wanted her to know that I was paying attention and not oblivious to what she was going through.

  You see, I’ve skipped over something, as reluctant to dwell on it now as I was to accept it then. Just before I moved to Detroit, Mom was diagnosed with cancer.

  None of us in the family knew quite what to make of it, because the hard facts of the diagnosis contradicted how healthy she seemed. She had uterine cancer, but of a rare kind that acted more like ovarian cancer, which was bad. We knew that even without having to educate ourselves: there had been extensive news coverage of Gilda Radner’s struggle with ovarian cancer and of her death in 1989, the very year of Mom’s diagnosis. Pressed to make a prediction, Mom’s doctors told her she might survive for two years.

  Almost immediately there was surgery, and then she started what would become round after round of different chemotherapies. She soldiered through them without suffering the worst of the fatigue and nausea chemo can cause. She soldiered through them without complaint. She was the same as ever: chatty, silly, impulsive, excitable and of course ornery, but not about the cancer, never about that. Occasionally she got a panicked, haunted look in her eyes, and her hair went from straight to curly, the chemo acting as an unflattering perm. But she made jokes about that.

  And she had distractions. Harry was engaged to be married, beating Mark and Adelle to the altar, giving Mom her first opportunity to fuss over a child’s wedding and giving her a daughter-in-law, Sylvia, whom she adored. Sylvia was thin, fine-boned, long-necked, tall. She looked nothing like a Bruni, and my favorite part of the wedding ceremony and reception was seeing her pose for pictures next to Grandma, who barely cleared her navel, even in her high heels and even with her high, stiff wedding-day hairdo. My second favorite part was watching Uncle Jim and Uncle Mario help Grandma out of the reception hall and across the parking lot at the end. She had danced so much that her feet were blistered and swollen, and she’d had to ditch those heels.


  Soon after the wedding Mom was consumed by all the pesky domestic details surrounding Dad’s latest transfer, from San Diego to New York City. Although rounding up new doctors and making sure her medical treatment didn’t suffer in the transition gave her plenty to worry about, she still found time to sweat the usual stuff: whether the houses lined up by her real estate agent had kitchens that would pass muster; whether she should stick with Corian or switch her countertop allegiance to granite, which was then in vogue; whether Dad would survive the separation from Remington’s.

  The house they ended up buying was in Scarsdale, which was adjacent to White Plains but more exclusive, a way of simultaneously returning to a patch of turf they knew well and feeling they’d moved up in the world.

  Not long after she and Dad settled into the Scarsdale house, she called Grandma several times one day and didn’t get an answer.

  This was strange: she’d talked to Grandma just the day before, and Grandma hadn’t said anything about any plans to run errands, shop or do anything else that might take and keep her out of the house for hours. So Mom drove over to Fifth Street.

  She found Grandma unconscious on the floor outside her bedroom. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered a major stroke.

  While she was still in the hospital, I flew from Detroit to see her: perhaps the only visit with Grandma during which she wasn’t hurling food at me and I wasn’t idly protesting that she stop. She barely had the strength to kiss me and mumble the few words she said.

  There was a good chance she wouldn’t be able to live alone anymore, so Mom began sizing up the Scarsdale house, figuring out if it could be made suitable for someone with limited mobility. It had an odd layout, with many half flights of stairs between clusters of rooms, all these steps and more steps. But Mom determined that ramps could be installed, and she concluded that it made more sense for Grandma to live with her and Dad than with Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki or with Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn, because she and Dad were the only ones whose kids were grown and gone. Mark, Harry and I had graduated from college and begun working; Adelle was finishing up at Princeton.