Born Round Read online

  From the limited selection of 36s, I plucked a dark green and a dark blue pair. Dark colors were more crucial than ever now. I walked to the dressing room, tried on the green pants. They barely cleared my hips. There wasn’t any point in seeing if I could get the zipper all the way up or button the pants closed. I wouldn’t be able to walk in them.

  I tried on the blue pants. They cleared my hips and . . . oof! sheesh! ouch! I stood ramrod straight, a guard at Buckingham Palace, as I tugged at the zipper so hard that its metal edges dug like spades into my fingers. I sucked in my stomach. I sucked harder. I held my breath. I could wear these pants, but only if I was willing to part ways with oxygen.

  “These are cut really, really slim,” I told Greg when I rejoined him outside the dressing room. “It’s crazy how slim they’re cut.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “you should look in the 38s.” He said it like he was expecting this all along.

  “They’ll be too baggy,” I argued, suddenly unconvinced they would be.

  “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Just try them.”

  “Fine,” I said, and grabbed the first two pairs I came across, even though one was a too-light golden color. The other, more acceptable one was dark brown.

  Both fit perfectly.

  I strode right past Greg on my way out of the dressing room and toward the cashier, the pants not draped over one of my forearms but scrunched up in my clenched hands. As far as I was concerned Greg could catch up with me at the register, beside the car—wherever.

  “What’s your problem?” he asked as we left the store.

  I was ready to unload on him. How had he let me gain this much weight—however much weight it was—without diplomatically directing my attention to it? How had he not gingerly noted that I wasn’t running as frequently as before and nudged me out the door? Shouldn’t he have stepped in?

  But just before I began a tirade, I realized that what I was mistaking for fury at him was really epic embarrassment—outsize shame. I had not only plumped up rounder than I usually let myself get but had done so in front of a witness as near and ever present as I’d ever had, a witness of a more intimate kind. Although I had wanted a margin of error around Greg, this was way more than a margin.

  “Midas better be ready,” I told him. “Starting tomorrow, he is going to be taking some long runs with me.” And so he did—with pauses, of course, so other runners could duly admire him. The 38s got looser, and then I retired them, actually threw them away. But they suggested how far I could slide. As it happened, they soft-pedaled the possibilities.

  Greg and I scouted furniture stores for the right couch to put in the living room and carpet stores for the right rug to put in front of it. Together we took Midas to the vet. We went to his Aunt Margaret’s house for her lasagna and then bickered amiably about it, him defending the way she added cinnamon to her tomato sauce, me crying foul. We signed both of our names on the cards accompanying gifts to the friends we now had in common. As a couple we went to dinner parties, and as a couple we hosted dinner parties. When Mom called, he and she would chat for a good ten minutes before she thought to ask for me or he thought to pass the phone along.

  And for my thirtieth birthday, he secretly organized it so that Mom and Dad, Mark and Lisa, Harry and Sylvia, and Adelle and Tom all flew in for a surprise party. He organized it so that even Elli, my grad school coconspirator, who was then living in the Catskills in upstate New York, flew in. About two dozen of my closest friends in Detroit rounded out the crowd.

  Many were from the Free Press, where I’d come to know just about everyone, because I’d changed assignments so often and because some of the stories I’d done had attracted a lot of attention. Following my stint in the Persian Gulf, my editors had given me an unusually long leash, letting me do ambitious, detailed feature pieces, one of which, a profile of a convicted child molester, had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. It had even led to a book, written with Elli, about child sex abuse by Catholic priests.

  After that, I swerved again, indulging an interest in films—I’d seen plenty of Coppola and Malick in addition to Flashdance—to become a movie critic for the newspaper. I went to as many as a half dozen movie screenings a week. I flew regularly to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York to interview directors and stars, and I toted home great cocktail party stories: about Sandra Bullock insisting that I stay in her trailer on the set of While You Were Sleeping and listen to the brand-new song “You Gotta Be,” by Des’ree, while she changed in the back for her next scene; about Mel Gibson summarily shutting off my tape recorder and launching into a foul-mouthed rant when I asked him about past characterizations of him as a homophobe and archconservative.

  Even so, I was restless, wanting new challenges and adventures, feeling too young to stand still, thinking and often talking about leaving Detroit. Whenever I mentioned that, Greg and I fought. He was the only child of two aging parents who lived in the Detroit area. His other relatives, best friends, favorite haunts and most cherished memories: all revolved around Detroit. He wanted to stay there. And he demanded to know why, if I loved him, I couldn’t at least entertain that possibility.

  It was a fair question, prompting me to ask myself others. Was the steady contentment I felt with and around him love, or was it comfort? Where was the dividing line between the two, and how could you ever trace it? Was Greg a solution to my physical insecurities, or just a way to hide from the problem?

  I hadn’t found any answers when I got a call from a good friend of Elli’s working as a deputy metropolitan editor for the New York Times. I’d apparently been on the newspaper’s radar ever since the Pulitzers, and Elli’s friend wanted to know if I was wedded to movie criticism or if I’d consider a general reporting position on the Times’s metropolitan desk. I said I’d consider it, and then I was on a plane to New York, and then I had a job offer, and then I was telling Greg he should move with me to New York, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted him to.

  For a while he toyed with the idea, but he couldn’t get past his anger that I’d decided to take the job without making sure it was okay with him. He railed about how inconsiderate I was. How selfish. By the time I packed up my footwear and the rest of my expanded wardrobe, it seemed unlikely he’d be following me. I reached New York feeling guilty, crummy and empty.

  · THREE ·

  Ipso Fatso

  Eleven

  For Harry’s wedding, Mom and Dad had been relatively restrained. They had hosted only 55 of the wedding’s 130 guests at the previous night’s rehearsal dinner. And they had held the dinner at a restaurant more charming than showy, a sweet country inn of sorts.

  For Mark’s wedding to Lisa, which took place in Dallas, her hometown, in the late spring of 1994, Mom and Dad had gone bigger, brasher, Bruni-er. The rehearsal dinner was held in a private club near the top floor of one of the tallest skyscrapers downtown. There were ninety-six guests, because Dad felt that all of Lisa’s closest Texas relatives should be there and of course Uncle Jim and Uncle Mario and their families should be there and, come to think of it, shouldn’t anyone who was traveling from the Northeast all the way to Texas be able to look forward to a fancy meal in addition to the one at the wedding? An additional fancy meal is what Dad gave them, and he insisted that there be a continuously open bar not only in the room where the cocktail hour took place but also in the nearby dining room, where the more serious eating occurred, because he didn’t want people to have to walk all the way across the hall to freshen their drinks. What kind of host, he asked, would allow that?

  But Adelle’s wedding to Tom, in Scarsdale in the fall of 1995, let Mom and Dad seize control of the actual wedding reception itself for the first time. They didn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

  Their worry that people be adequately fed was reflected less in the sit-down meal—a four-course affair, because there had to be a pasta course between the appetizer and the main course—than in the cocktail hour that preceded
it. For starters they decided that this hour should be extended to ninety minutes—it had to be ninety minutes—because anything shorter wouldn’t allow the 175 guests to size up and visit the food stations that would exist in addition to the passed hors d’oeuvres, of which there were nearly a dozen.

  Harry (far right), Mark (next to him) and me with Adelle at her wedding.

  There was a station where a carver stood poised to press his knife through various kinds of meats. There was a pasta station offering different noodles and different sauces. There was, naturally, a cold seafood station, and there was a cheese station as well. And then there was something more eye-catching than anything else, with its glittering glassware and its blocks of ice: a vodka station, with several brands of vodka and several flavors of vodka and pony glasses and Champagne flutes and a half dozen fresh fruits to be used as garnishes, mixes or little nibbles on the side.

  “Jim, did you get to the vodka bar?” Dad asked Uncle Jim, leading him in that direction. Dad was the first of his brothers and cousins—the first of his generation in the Bruni and Mazzone families—to throw a wedding for a daughter, and he wanted everyone to see that he was doing it in style.

  “Carolyn, did you have some pasta?” he asked Aunt Carolyn, nudging her pesto-ward.

  He directed one platter of hors d’oeuvres toward Grandma’s brother Agostino and another toward Grandma’s sister-in-law Florence, saying to them, “Ma would have loved this, don’t you think?” She would have. Not a minute of the event went by without my thinking that, and I didn’t have to check with any of my uncles, aunts or siblings to know that not a minute went by without their thinking that, too.

  Dad was part conductor and part shepherd, his mission to make sure people got as much food and drink as they could handle and then got some more. Bunched up in his dark tuxedo, he moved in abrupt bursts, his upper body tilted slightly forward, the way it always did when he was nervous or rushed, and his hands balled into fists.

  He was a creature of such fierce, fierce pride, so clearly his mother’s son, hypervigilant about the face he showed the world, keenly attuned to what the world might be thinking of him and his family. When I’d been in school and he’d insisted on As or betrayed disappointment at a slow time in a swim meet, he wasn’t just trying to make sure I did my best and got as far as I might want to in life. He was also mourning an aura of perfection I’d just sullied.

  And yet his attention to that aura didn’t extend to how I looked, or rather to whether I was showing the world a figure as handsome and fit as I could be. Unlike Mom, who chose not to recognize or reconcile the contradiction of shoving food at me one day and a diet book the next, Dad never nagged me about my eating and never said much of anything when I gained weight. He never nagged Adelle, either. I always wondered: Was it because the notion of plenty was so central to his conception of taking care of people—of having the economic wherewithal to do so? Because he saw a joy in my eating that he couldn’t bring himself to challenge? Or because he understood what it was like to be weak around food, which was what he often used to relieve all the pressure he put on himself?

  For a man so image-conscious, he was an awful dieter, still carrying around appreciably more weight than he should. He didn’t try to hide his zest for food. And he goaded the people around him to demonstrate the same kind of enthusiasm.

  “Did you have enough to eat?” he asked a business associate he had invited to Adelle’s wedding. He unclenched one of his balled fists to pat the associate on the back. “Have some more, before we get called in to dinner.”

  “This isn’t the dinner?” the business associate asked.

  “Of course not!” Dad said, feigning surprise at the question, which was precisely the question he expected and wanted to get.

  I parked myself near the vodka station, where Mom whizzed by me at one point. I nodded toward it and flashed a confused expression at her.

  Mom, gaunt from the cancer and chemotherapy,

  with Dad at Adelle’s wedding.

  “We’re suddenly Russian?” I teased.

  “Look how many people are crowding around it!” she shot back. “Vodka’s what all the young people drink.” I could tell she was feeling very with-it and in-touch and of-the-moment and maybe a few other hyphenated phrases connoting keen, boundary-traversing generational empathy.

  She looked fantastic, her smile turned up as high as it went, her dark green dress bringing out the steely blue of her eyes, which were aglow from the privilege and power trip of being the mistress of ceremonies, the mother of the bride. Actually, she looked fantastic and terrible at the same time, but the terrible part we all tried to edit out of our mental pictures of her, because the terrible part was the cancer’s doing. She was thin, too thin, by any standard: a good five pounds shy of anything healthy. Her face was gaunt and her arms were spindly, and that hadn’t been the case after the first or second or even third round of chemo. But all of it was catching up to her now, six years into the two years her doctors had said she could hope to live.

  She was exhausted, she was defiant. Here she was celebrating a family milestone that she wasn’t supposed to be around to see, and another milestone was within reach. Sylvia was pregnant, and it was beginning to show: Mom’s first grandchild was on the way. She was determined to hold that baby and confident that she had a will steely enough to guarantee herself the experience, but she wasn’t sure about much after that. With increasing frequency she reminded me that I’d promised not to let her suffer if things were headed in that direction, to make sure it was fast at the end. I murmured the proper assurances and nodded the proper assent, though I had no idea if or how I could follow through, and Mom hadn’t mapped out any kind of scenario. It was just this vague, chilling understanding we had.

  I paid the vodka station more attention than anything else at the wedding, trying to find a Dostoevsky-esque grandeur in my apprehension and sadness, wondering how many glasses of vodka on the rocks erased a parent’s terminal illness, and how many more erased my own fickleness (had I been fickle?) and disloyalty and selfishness (was I guilty of these, too?) in beating such a decisive retreat out of Detroit and away from Greg. And what about the worry I felt every time I walked into the Times building, a worry that never wholly abated and was with me even now? How many glasses of vodka for that?

  On the work front, the three months since I’d left Detroit had been miserable. I arrived at the Times having not handled a concise, straightforward news story in about three years, but these were the kinds of stories that I’d signed up for and that were instantly thrown at me. I reported and wrote them in a state of dread, and after filing them, I sometimes watched as an editor recast the first sentences and lopped off every other sentence after that and made the fifth and sixth paragraphs the tenth and eleventh paragraphs and then struck the last two hundred words, dismissing them as long-winded effluvium. The newspaper published a few articles under my byline that bore only an oblique relationship to what I’d actually handed in.

  Assignment after assignment seemed like an invitation to failure or an exercise in near-catastrophe. I was sent out to the Hamptons to cover raging wildfires and told to interview homeowners either fleeing from their homes, refusing to budge or coming back in tremulous states to appraise the wreckage. But every time I got near a neighborhood in the fire zone, I encountered a police barricade and was turned back. Radio reporters and wire service reporters, however, were getting precisely the sorts of scenes and interviews I wasn’t—what trick wasn’t I figuring out? When I finally did reach a threatened neighborhood and set foot on the front lawn of one of the houses, a large, snarling dog rushed at me and sank its teeth into my right thigh before I could back away. I limped into the newspaper’s offices back in Manhattan that night with ripped, bloodstained pants. I went into the men’s room, looked in the mirror and thought: That’s about right. The way I looked matched the way I felt. I was a mess through and through.

  For a few weeks after I lande
d in New York, Greg and I talked on the phone as often as every other night. Not talked: negotiated, needled, nitpicked and ultimately shouted. Tense discussions about who should get which lamp and how much he should pay me for my equity in the house led to pettier, nastier dissections of our sex life or of our friends, he claiming never to have liked most of mine, I claiming in return never to have liked any of his.

  And if these interchanges came at the end of one of my more nerve-racking days at the Times, I’d find myself rushing out the door afterward to a nearby bodega—for beer, for chips, for ice cream, for all of it—or riffling through a stack of delivery menus. Delivery menus! Manhattan was the mother lode of them: Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Lebanese, any -ese there was. Also Mexican and Italian and Thai, not to mention Indian and Peruvian and Cuban. Every day a new menu appeared just inside the front door of my Uptown apartment near Columbia University, slipped through the crack underneath the door by unseen underminers, a multipaged message for the shut-in binger: Psst. Have I got something delicious for you! I called the numbers on the menus, counted the minutes until the doorbell rang and then opened the door wide to enchiladas and empanadas, satays and spring rolls.

  It was a fast, easy, certain source of pleasure, not dependent on the assent or participation of anyone else. I’d spread the cartons and tins of food on the living room coffee table so I could survey and size up the bounty. I’d put on sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt: nothing that could cinch or cling. I’d put something trashy and brainless on television, maybe one of those women-in-peril movies starring Veronica Hamel or Markie Post. And the world would shrink to just a few square feet around me and to the warm, uncomplicated, unremarkable ripple of gratification running through me.