Born Round Read online

  Those ramps never had to be installed. Grandma died soon after her stroke. She was eighty-one.

  Toward the end of the visitations at the funeral parlor, Uncle Jim took out a camera and snapped several pictures of her in her casket, which was open, in accordance with family and southern Italian traditions. The pictures were for her relatives back in Puglia, to whom Grandma had sporadically sent documentary evidence of her good fortune, visual support for her written assertions that life in America was going well. More than a half century earlier she had photographed my father as a newborn, wanting to present her distant sisters with proof that she had been the first among them to produce a son. In the picture she had sent them he was naked.

  In the picture that Uncle Jim took of Grandma at the funeral home she was wearing an elegant dress, and her hair and makeup were flawless. The point was that she looked regal and affluent in death, like a woman who had talked on a gold phone. What would the people think? That she had lived a good, gilded life. Her relatives back in Italy needed to be assured of that.

  Back at Carolina I’d taken a psychology class with a professor whose mantra, only tangentially connected to what we were studying, was that life was ultimately about adjusting to loss, about letting go. He meant life after a certain point in time—after a certain age—and I wondered, with Grandma’s death, if I was already there. Yes, new people would come along, but none who might loom anywhere near as large on the landscape of my life, of my whole identity, as she had. With luck a few of these people would love me, but none with the fierceness and pride that she had.

  My world had just become irrevocably smaller and colder, and it threatened to become smaller and colder still. But I pushed that thought away.

  Mom looked fine. Mom was fine. It was Mom who had been poised to care for Grandma.

  A truly sick person didn’t step up to play nurse.

  I felt lonely in a way that I hadn’t before. Back in Detroit I toted up the men I’d dated over the past few years and started worrying that I’d called it quits with some of them for dubious reasons and had maybe missed out on something. I realized, too, that I’d almost always called it quits precisely at the one-month mark. I had a pattern.

  Then Greg came along.

  Robin, my fashion writer friend, fixed us up.

  “Solid job,” she said in describing him, because he made decent money as a marketing executive for a chain of hardware stores.

  “Handsome,” she added, because he stood more than six feet tall and had a striking combination of strong Greek features with soft, non-Greek coloring.

  “And I really think he’ll like you,” she concluded, because she knew something that she kept from me but that Greg later confessed. For him it wasn’t a blind date. He’d seen me give a speech about my work at the Free Press.

  Maybe that had somehow made me seem important. Maybe on our first date I wore something with astonishing thinning powers. For one reason or another, Greg decided right away that I was the guy he wanted, and he constantly made that clear—so clear that I could shelve some of my physical insecurity around him. I felt safe, and that feeling, coupled with my determination to break the pattern I’d only just identified, carried me into a second month with him, then a third.

  Around Greg I could eat. I didn’t do what I’d done around other men, didn’t pretend to be full after five bites of an appetizer and seven of an entrée and then wave away dessert, saying I didn’t know how I could possibly find the space, when my stomach was nothing but space, a McMansion of stomach, with laundry rooms and powder rooms and walk-in closets and in-law suites that other stomachs didn’t have. Around Greg I hankered out loud, assenting without pause whenever he offered to make me a big dinner of penne alla vodka, meat loaf or, on special occasions, tenderloin with a creamy horseradish sauce. I cleaned my plate. I had seconds.

  And it wasn’t just that he made me feel safe—made me feel I had a margin of error when it came to my eating and my weight. It was less rosy than that. Although I would come to tell him that I loved him and on some level believe it, I never felt that he was the key to my happiness, that I’d be crushed if he went away, that I had to worry and work to make sure that never happened. I could live without him. And I figured that if he wouldn’t stick by me plus a few extra pounds, I probably should live without him.

  Both of us adored restaurants, for the theater and civilized pampering and pure deliciousness of eating out. And over time I’d become a better restaurant-goer. I hadn’t eaten Chinese with Martin every night in New York; there were visits with other friends to some of Manhattan’s most buzzed-about restaurants, like Arizona 206 and the Union Square Cafe. And when Dad had taken business trips to New York from La Jolla, he had treated me time and again to the Four Seasons, where I first tried duck. One bite of its crunchy, fatty, glistening skin and I was a goner. At the Four Seasons I never ordered anything but the duck.

  Greg and I cycled quickly through all of his favorite restaurants in the Detroit area and all of mine, then cycled through them again. We had Vietnamese food just across the Detroit River in Windsor, Canada, at the Mini, where I’d first been educated in the silky, starchy wonder of congee. We had Middle Eastern food at Café La Shish in Dearborn, salmon seared in butter with capers at Joe Muir. For pasta we went to a restaurant called Little Italy in the far-flung suburb of Northville or to Lepanto in the nearby suburb of Royal Oak.

  We logged hundreds of road miles chasing restaurant food, because that was the nature of the Detroit metropolitan area, which didn’t really have a center of gravity, and because that was the nature of our appetites, which also sprawled. We had comfortable cars with cruise control and CD players, and we had our priorities.

  Greg wasn’t as prone to gaining weight as I was, and in the beginning I exercised enough to stave off the ravages of our adventures. But then I got sloppy. Bit by bit I let my guard down—with eating, with sex. With previous boyfriends I’d been hyperaware, even when drunk, of every aspect of every sexual encounter: the brightness of the room; the angle from which the other person was getting a glimpse of me; whether those conditions would conspire to expose and underscore my flabbiness; how far from reach my T-shirt and underwear were. I’d want them back on as soon as we were done.

  But not with Greg. I didn’t always insist on darkness; I didn’t instantly reach for that clothing. The difference was significant, but what exactly did it signify? I wasn’t certain. So I initially resisted when, about four months after we met, Greg started lobbying me to give up my apartment and move into his small house just beyond the city limits.

  He plotted a course around my resistance. He got sneaky.

  “How about we pass by the pound?” he said one weekend day as we drove around doing errands. “Just to look.”

  He knew that I loved dogs and longed for one and that my family had had a frustrating, sad history with them: an Alaskan malamute that kept tunneling under the fence in Avon, despite all our measures to prevent that, and disappeared forever one day; an English setter that darted out the side door in La Jolla one morning and ended up under the wheel of a car. He also knew that my apartment building didn’t allow pets.

  “OK,” I said. “Just to look.”

  “To look,” he echoed. A few beats later he added: “My backyard is fenced in.”

  An hour later we pulled out of the pound parking lot with an eight-pound fur ball named Chester. From that night forward, I slept only at Greg’s house. Within two months I’d moved in.

  Black with tan patches, Chester had been labeled a “shepherd mix” by the pound. In fact every dog with his coloring had been labeled a “shepherd mix,” a phrase whose ubiquity signaled either a disproportionate libidinousness among the German shepherds of southeastern Michigan or a lack of imagination among pound employees when it came to matters of nomenclature. As Chester got bigger it became clear that he was mostly Rottweiler, with some terrier thrown in. This wasn’t a propitious mix.

  Chester ran in
a demented fashion around the living room. He ran in a demented fashion around the backyard, fast and furious and over and over, a doggie perturbed, a doggie possessed, a doggie impervious to my pleas that he stop and my stratagems to get him to by brandishing fistfuls of raw ground beef. He was seldom still and seldom sweet, and when he took to snarling at Greg, Greg had had enough. He wanted to get rid of Chester.

  Out of loyalty and stubbornness, I insisted we give Chester one more chance, and I took him to obedience school two nights a week.

  Other dogs learned to sit on command.

  Chester didn’t.

  Other dogs came when called.

  Chester wouldn’t.

  On the way home from class he’d sit in the front passenger seat next to me, and I’d say, “Do you know how disappointed I am in you? Do you know how embarrassed I was in front of all the other daddies and mommies?”

  He wouldn’t so much as cock an ear.

  “Your days are numbered, you know?” I’d say.

  He’d bark at a dog in a passing car.

  About six months after Chester came into our lives, he was out of our lives, successfully pawned off on a gullible, optimistic family with more time and a bigger yard for him. We replaced him a few months later with Midas, an eight-month-old purebred golden retriever relinquished by his show-dog kennel because of some medical condition that made him a less-than-ideal sire.

  By that point Greg and I were in a center-entrance three-bedroom brick colonial in the old-money suburb of Grosse Pointe Farms. The mortgage was in both of our names.

  My pattern was officially broken.

  And my weight was inching upward.

  Greg was the first boyfriend I brought home to meet my parents and my siblings, and he accompanied me, too, on one of our family’s vacations in Hilton Head, South Carolina, which had gradually evolved into an annual tradition. Hilton Head had golf courses that Dad loved. He and Mom would rent a house near the beach with at least five bedrooms, and Mark, Harry, Adelle and I, along with any significant others or spouses of ours, would pile into it for a week of rest, relaxation, competition and food. We focused in particular on the competition and the food.

  There was almost nothing we couldn’t turn into a contest, a race. If we went bodysurfing, the talk between waves hinged on who had caught the biggest one and who had ridden it the longest distance toward the shore. If we went miniature golfing, someone shouted out an update of everyone’s scores after each hole, so that there was never any doubt about who was in the lead, who was in the rear and how many strokes separated them.

  And then there was Oh, Hell, something of a cross between bridge and hearts, with trump cards and bids and ten successive hands per game. The optimal limit of players for it was five. We usually had about ten. So we created a system in which two games occurred simultaneously, one in a “major league” and the other in a “minor league.” At the beginning of the night, players were assigned at random to one of the leagues. But at the end of each successive game, the person with the worst score from the major league was sent to the minors, while the person with the best score from the minor league ascended to the majors. By the fifth or sixth game, the league a player inhabited indeed reflected how well he or she was playing.

  Mark (far left) and his wife-to-be, Lisa,

  with Mom and me in Hilton Head.

  Sometimes the two leagues were just at opposite ends of the same long dining room table, sometimes at different tables in the same room or in adjacent ones. They had to be within talking distance of each other, to allow for scripts like the following, typical one.

  Harry, sitting in the majors, to Mark, beside him: “You’ve got to be looking around right now, seeing who’s up here and who’s down there, and thinking that justice has prevailed. The elite players are grouped as they should be.”

  Mark, who had started in the minors: “You know what’s amazing? It’s more comfortable here. The chairs feel softer. The air’s cleaner. Breathe that in! That’s major-league air.”

  Lisa, Mark’s fiancée, in the minors: “Someone might be sleeping on the couch tonight.”

  Me, sitting beside her: “Someone should be hit in the head.”

  Mark, to Harry: “Shouldn’t there be some rule that the minor leaguers have to refresh the major leaguers’ drinks? I’m due for a new beer.”

  Mom, in the minors: “You people are obnoxious. I can’t believe I raised you.”

  Some nights we’d eat in, but a few nights we’d eat out, making a big, boozy, beefy production of it. One of our go-to restaurants, Stripes, a steakhouse, served oversize portions that guaranteed leftovers, designated for lunch the next day and maybe even the day after that. Sometimes, though, they disappeared first.

  “Where’s the rest of my rib eye?” Mark would say when he peeled back the aluminum foil around what was a suspiciously tiny slab of beef.

  He would look at me. So would Harry and Lisa and Adelle and Dad. It didn’t matter that, the night before, at one a.m., when I’d gone from my and Greg’s bedroom to the refrigerator, I’d tiptoed. Everyone knew anyway.

  “Are you sure that’s your leftover steak?” I might say, feebly. “Maybe it’s someone else’s.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mark would answer.

  “Maybe Tom ate it,” I’d counter, referring to Adelle’s boyfriend, who would eventually become her husband. As a newcomer to the family, he could be used as the fall guy. And he was a more credible culprit than Sylvia, whose weakness was sweets, or Lisa. Lisa was a mincing, birdlike eater, and had turned Mark into one, too. Since meeting her, he’d developed this odd habit of cutting his food into minuscule bites and chewing each one some two dozen times. His eating had become as seemingly joyless as any eating I’d ever witnessed. As a weight-loss mechanism, it didn’t tempt me in the least.

  He and Harry loved to call me out on my late-night refrigerator raids because it affirmed that their willpower was superior to mine: another competition they were winning. After listening to them rib me about the leftovers I’d pilfered or the disproportionate number of tortilla chips I’d dragged through the salsa or the extra scoop of ice cream I’d put in my bowl, I’d skulk away to read a book—or I’d throw on some running clothes and huff through two miles made harder by the rib eye and the chips and the ice cream. I’d wear a baggy shirt out to dinner that night, hoping to cloak my excesses.

  Greg sometimes questioned the make, cut or color of the shirt. He sometimes questioned the rest of my outfit, too. But the eating? Unlike my brothers or the voices in my own head, he didn’t judge me for—or tease me about—that.

  “We should go clothes shopping,” Greg said one morning back in Grosse Pointe Farms, as I poured myself a cup of coffee and unfolded the day’s Free Press, which I’d just fetched from the front stoop. I was going to scan the first few paragraphs of the front-page stories, then take Midas for his morning walk. I almost always took Midas for his morning walk. I liked the way neighbors and random passersby stopped me just to tell me how gorgeous he was. I’d swell with pride, as if his lustrous coat was actually my genetic bequest to him.

  Greg pressed: “What if we go shopping after work today?”

  He went clothes shopping all the time, toting me with him whenever I would let him. He’d done wonders for my wardrobe, which hadn’t previously existed as anything complete and distinguished enough to be called a wardrobe. When we’d met I was down to one pair of shoes other than sneakers, these shapeless once-brown clunkers that were now mottled with orange spots in all the places where the dye had faded. I wore them with dress slacks as well as with casual pants. I wore them with my only suit. Vanity’s an erratic ruler, governing some things so ruthlessly that others escape its scrutiny altogether.

  But after a half year with Greg, I had Ferragamo dress shoes, Bally loafers, Joan & David boots. I liked shopping for shoes, because trying them on didn’t involve any kind of measurement or determination of where I was on the trimmer-to-heavier spectrum. Arche
s and toes had a constancy that love handles didn’t.

  But at this particular juncture, Greg wasn’t proposing that we shop for shoes.

  “Don’t you think you should get some new pants?” he said, his voice as gentle as he could sculpt it.

  I did need new pants. I was down to a pair of jeans and a pair of Army green chinos that fit, and they fit only because I’d worn them so frequently and stretched them so much. They were so faded and frayed that the numbers indicating their sizes weren’t readily discernible. In any case, I wasn’t trying to discern them. Wasn’t that one of the benefits of being in a relationship with someone as devoted as Greg—that I didn’t have to look? My memory was that the chinos were 35s. So I guessed I needed 36s, and I guessed I could live with that, but only until I lost a few pounds.

  “OK,” I told Greg. “But just a pair or two, because whatever we buy now isn’t going to fit me a month from now. It’s just to tide me over.”

  He didn’t argue.

  “And we should go to a discount place,” I added. “T.J. Maxx or Marshalls. It’s not worth spending money on something so temporary.”

  He nodded.

  We went to T.J. Maxx. The narrow aisles and jammed racks depressed me, but then this shopping excursion wasn’t meant to be fun, just functional. I found the men’s section, then the slacks, then oriented myself in terms of those round white number signs on the horizontal poles, the signs with waist sizes. I dawdled briefly at the 32s, just in case anyone was watching—just for show.

  Then it was on to the 34s, though there was no sense looking through those, either. I went grudgingly to the 36s, which would probably fit. Or would they? I realized I was unsure, and wondered for a few instants if in fact the pants that had become too small were 36s. No, no. Impossible. I’d remember if I’d purchased 36s. I’d definitely remember.