Born Round Read online

  Me (left), Harry and Mark.

  They joked that my initials, F.B., stood for Fat Boy. Mom told me to ignore it, but there were moments when she herself reminded me that I was larger than I should be. Frustrated by my failure to fend off an older girl at school who regularly taunted and shoved me until I gave her my lunch money, Mom said: “Next time, why don’t you just sit on her?” Mom had never seen her, but made the safe assumption that I outweighed her.

  Whenever I went to the doctor for a routine checkup I hurried off the scale, trying my best not to hear him tell Mom, yet again, that I was more than a few pounds above the recommended weight for a child of my size. I could see, in the Christmas card pictures that Mom took every year, how much fuller my cheeks were than Mark’s or Harry’s, how much broader my waist was, and I knew that in one of these pictures, I was holding Adelle—had volunteered to hold Adelle—because it was a way of obscuring the whole middle stretch of my body.

  I wasn’t obese. I didn’t prompt stares or gasps. I was just chubby, and sometimes quite chubby, with a hunger that threatened to make matters worse and a gnawing self-consciousness about how bad things already were. And I couldn’t understand why my body just wouldn’t behave, whether I was using it to swat at a baseball or willing it not to clamor so loudly for more ice cream—willing it to shrink, even just a little, and look more like Mark’s or Harry’s or most of my schoolmates’.

  Encouraging more exercise, Mom might suggest that I join a game of neighborhood tag, but I’d resist: I was slower than other kids, and didn’t want them to say anything about that. She might suggest that I skip a second helping of rice, and I’d know that was a good idea, but I’d eat it anyway, her gentle protest trailing off in the face of my blunt enthusiasm. I just liked it so much, the taste of the rice (lavishly buttered and salted, of course), the chewing of it, the way it filled my mouth, the way it filled my stomach. In the moment it made me happy, and I got lost in the moment.

  She wanted to help me but couldn’t figure out how. Then, shortly after I turned eight, a new possibility emerged.

  Mom was a sucker for fad diets. Like Dad she was always heavier than she wanted to be, though her range was smaller—she’d be, at any given moment, between five and fifteen pounds over her goal weight—and her resolve to do something about it was more frequently renewed. She started many weeks and many months determined to be lighter by the end of them. She succeeded; she failed; the results lasted the better part of a year; the results didn’t last a nanosecond. It was an endless cycle, punctuated with the Scarsdale Diet and the Beverly Hills Diet and any other diet with a fancy zip code and the connotation of a gilded, svelte life.

  She did some diet that required the consumption of a half grapefruit at a half dozen intervals during the day—it didn’t work, as I recall, but it certainly kept her safe from scurvy. There was a popcorn diet of some kind, and for a while the sounds that most frequently escaped the kitchen were the vacuum-like whirring of an air popper and the crack-ping-crack of the kernels.

  In time there would be prepackaged meals from the Diet Center, which ceded their territory years after that to prepackaged meals from Jenny Craig. There was a period when she swore by Wasa bread—those hard, flat rectangles that could pass for wood chips and made sheets of matzo seem pillowy and buttery—and there was a period when she swore by artificially sweetened Jell-O. My mother believed that somewhere out there was a holy grail of weight loss, and she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to find it.

  But the diet I remember best, because I joined her on it, was Dr. Atkins’s low-carbohydrate diet. People who became wise to it only in the 1990s tend to forget that it made its initial splash back in the early 1970s, which was when Mom and I first gave it a whirl. Here was Dr. Atkins, saying that someone with an appetite that wouldn’t be tamed—an appetite like mine—didn’t have to tame it. He or she just had to channel it in the right direction, away from carbohydrates.

  Of course I had never heard the word “carbohydrate” before, but I was thrilled by all the consonants and syllables in it. To me they meant that something terribly scientific—something nutritionally profound—was at hand. I interrupted whatever latest Hardy Boys mystery I was plowing through to crack open Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, which Mom had bought in hardcover, anxious to get her hands on it, convinced it was a keeper. I read about blood sugar levels and these chemicals called “ketones” and this charmed metabolic state in which you began to generate them or expel them or swirl in them or something along those lines. I didn’t exactly understand it but knew that my goal was to achieve this state, called “ketosis.” Ketosis was my preadolescent nirvana. It was what I wished for: ketosis, along with a new five-speed bicycle.

  The Atkins diet prohibited certain things I loved, like pretzels and ice cream, but it let me have as much as I wanted of other things I also loved, like Cheddar cheese omelets with pork sausage at breakfast or hamburger patties—three of them if that was my desire, so long as I dispensed with the bun and the ketchup—at dinner. It allowed snacks like hunks of Cheddar and roll-ups of turkey breast and Swiss cheese. I could even dip the roll-ups in mayonnaise and not be undermining the Atkins formula. According to Atkins, it was important to stay sated, because any empty crevasse of stomach was nothing but a welcome mat for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. So I left no crevasse unfilled. And I felt relieved—liberated. Silencing taunts and getting into smaller pants wouldn’t mean going hungry.

  For lunch on most days I had tuna salad. Mom tried to make it seem more special and eventful by presenting it in geometrically interesting and colorful ways. She used the largest round dinner plate she could find. She covered the plate with several overlapping leaves of iceberg lettuce. She molded the tuna salad—always Bumble Bee solid white tuna, never chunk light, never Chicken of the Sea—into three large scoops, which she put over the lettuce, within a ring of cherry tomatoes. Three scoops looked prettier than one or two. Besides, there wasn’t any doubt I’d be able to finish that many.

  “Aren’t you going to have some?” I’d ask.

  “Maybe later,” she’d say, and then I’d hear the crunch-woosh of the metal peel coming off another bright pink can of Tab, the worst diet cola ever made, the diet cola Mom never betrayed, her diet cola, its distance from sweetness and its metallic taste a way of patting herself on the back. When it came to beverages, was anyone more virtuous and penitential than she? Tab was her rosary, and she said it as many as eight times a day.

  Mom often skipped lunch, even on Atkins. When she did deprivation, she did deprivation all the way. Dinner, in any case, was her preferred meal. Until dinnertime Tab alone could sometimes get her through the day. Years later, Tab would become harder to find and she would turn to Diet Rite, assiduously steering clear of Diet Coke and refusing to entertain the notion of Diet Pepsi. Some people assert their independence and individuality through what they wear. Mom asserted hers through the artificially sweetened canned drink she favored.

  I drank Tab on Atkins. I drank Fresca, too, and sugar-free iced tea of various kinds. I was concerned less with my choice and range of beverages than with the little paper strips in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom off my parents’ bedroom. The strips went along with the Atkins diet, and they were clustered in a tiny cylindrical container, the way toothpicks might be.

  In the morning, in the late afternoon and just before bedtime, I’d slide or shimmy one of the strips from the jar, hold it in my left hand and get ready to pee. Then I’d pass the strip through the stream of urine and wait to see if it changed color. If it changed color, Mom had told me, the diet was working. If it changed color, I was in ketosis and I was melting the fat away.

  It didn’t change color on the second day. Or the third. But on the fourth, it did, going from white to a pinkish purple. And after just a few more days, I noticed a loosening in my pants. A tightening in my stomach. I was shrinking every second!

  And now that I’d crossed into ketosis, I could expand my c
arbohydrate intake somewhat, add more kinds of food to my regimen. I could have celery stalks slathered with peanut butter. Mom could fry instead of broiling my chicken, so long as its coating was only a subtle dusting of flour. I toted up and reveled in the possibilities. Less than a week and a half into this new state of sacrifice, I was already anxious for ways to mitigate it, already keeping a tally of indulgences deferred and rewards around the corner.

  I stayed on Atkins for close to three weeks. I lost something like seven pounds: enough to land me on the slender side of stocky. Then . . . well, Mom hadn’t really worked that out. The idea, I suppose, was that I’d be so encouraged by the change in my weight that I’d safeguard it with less gluttonous behavior, and I’d revisit Atkins for a tune-up from time to time.

  But Atkins hadn’t been so easy to pull off, not with so many others at the dinner table eating different, less monochromatic meals. Not with the occasional naysayer outside the family questioning the wisdom of such a restrictive fad diet for an eight-year-old and saying I’d just grow out of my weight. And not with Grandma Bruni around.

  At one point during the diet we went to see her. Except for the summer months, she and Grandpa lived in White Plains, just a ten-minute drive from us. Mom ushered me, Mark, Harry and Adelle, just a baby then, into Grandma’s kitchen, where Grandma had a platter stacked high with hunks of fried dough—frits, she called them. The word, rhyming with “treats,” was an abbreviation of fritti, which in Italian meant “fried things.” Grandma served frits with nearby piles of sugar, which you dragged them through. They weren’t Atkins-approved, so I didn’t reach for one.

  It took Grandma all of two seconds to notice.

  “What’s the matter for you?” she asked in her thickly accented, preposition-challenged English.

  “It’s fine, Ma,” said Mom, who addressed Grandma as if Grandma were her own mother. Grandma wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “He’s not eating!” Grandma protested. That was a shock in and of itself, on top of which it was offensive. Not lunging for and mooning over whatever fried, baked, boiled or broiled offering Grandma put before you was a violation of the unspoken covenant between her and anyone she cared about.

  Mom and I held our ground, neither of us eating frits. Grandma glared at us and banged pots and dishes and utensils loudly on the counter and complimented Mark and Harry more than usual on their own consumption.

  “You love Grandma’s frits?” she checked with them.

  They nodded.

  “Then you love your Grandma!” she said, throwing another big glare at Mom, and then a small one at me, whom she blamed only partly.

  To her thinking, Mom and I had done the equivalent of turning our faces away when she went to kiss us. We’d resisted the most heartfelt gesture she could make. We’d denied her the form of expression at which she was most fluent.

  Two

  To understand why food meant so much in the Bruni family, you have to understand why it meant so much to Grandma. For her, food was a currency and communicator like no other, trumpeting pride, establishing wealth, proving love. It gave her what bearings she had in the world. In fact, she’d come to the United States to cook.

  It was 1929, and she was seventeen. The voyage from Italy was a great adventure to her, a privilege for which her father, Vincenzo Mazzone, had singled her out. Her sisters were to remain in Ruvo di Puglia, a rural town outside the southeastern port city of Bari where the Mazzone family tended its olive and almond groves. Only she among the Mazzone girls would accompany her father and two of her brothers, Agostino and Giacinto, to America. Only she, Adelina, would experience this rich, magical country.

  Vincenzo had been to America before, to ascertain that there was more money to be made here than in southern Italy. He wanted to set his sons up in America as gardeners; although they didn’t have much education, they knew about soil and sunlight and how to make things grow. But they were young—Giacinto was eighteen and Agostino just shy of fifteen—and it would be a while before they were ready to marry. In the meantime they’d need someone to make their meals and clean up after them, and so would Vincenzo, for the few months he would stay in America to help his children get settled. That’s where Adelina came in. That was her America: an instant transition from daughter and sister to, really, wife and mother; an instant promotion, if it could be called that, from coddled teenager to take-charge, overwhelmed, premature matriarch.

  They lived in a two-bedroom cold-water flat in a four-family home in White Plains, where the poorer neighborhoods, like theirs, had concentrations of both African Americans and recent Italian immigrants like them. And they struggled. Just three months after they arrived, the stock market crashed and the stage was set for the Great Depression. But still they had to send money back to Italy—that was a big part of why they’d left, a central part of the plan. In addition to her responsibilities at home, Adelina worked as a seamstress, doing piecework.

  Not too long after she arrived she met Mauro Bruni. He had also come from the area of southern Italy around Bari and had also landed in White Plains. But while her route had been a fairly direct one, his hadn’t. After saving up as much money as he could from his work as a stonemason in the Italian coastal town of Bisceglie, he had traveled to Yugoslavia and then France and then across the Atlantic, all in the hope of getting to America. He entered the country from Canada, using forged papers. It would be many years before he finally became a legal citizen, in the late 1930s, and he initially lied to my grandmother and her father about his status, so that he wouldn’t be branded an undesirable suitor.

  They married in 1933 and moved into the cold-water flat, which by then was home only to Adelina, Giacinto and Agostino. She and Mauro took one bedroom; her brothers stayed together in the other. My father, whom they named Frank, was born in 1935, and he slept in his crib in their bedroom until Giacinto married and moved into a home of his own two years later. Then my father took Giacinto’s place in the room with Agostino until Agostino married and moved out another three years after that.

  My grandparents Mauro and Adelina on their wedding day.

  Giacinto, who became known as Jack, and Agostino, who went by the Americanized name of Gus, both married women of Italian descent, and that set up a friendly, and sometimes not so friendly, rivalry between the three sisters-in-law, Adelina (who went by Adele), Fiorina (Florence) and Liliana (Lillian).

  This rivalry played itself out in many ways. Florence prided herself on keeping the most immaculate home, and it was pretty much impossible for Adele or Lillian to challenge her on this front. Every day Florence swept the floor or vacuumed the carpet of every room, and every week she carried a broom outside and swept the curb in front of her house. She did the windows twice a week.

  Adele prided herself on her three boys: my father; his younger brother, Jim; and the youngest, Mario. Their hair was always cut short and slicked back with Dippity-do. During summer they got a fresh set of clean clothes after dinner, so that anyone who saw them walking through the neighborhood at eight p.m., when it was still light out, beheld perfect children. They did unusually well in school, and Adele made sure Florence and Lillian knew about that. Her bragging was ruthless.

  And Lillian, the only one who grew up in America, prided herself on being the least hidebound, the most flexible, the one whose home you could enter without any sense of ceremony, the one who would greet you in a housedress with the readiest, widest smile. When Adele and Mauro broke down and got their boys a cocker spaniel, it was confined to certain rooms, and it moved cautiously through them, alert to its lesser place in the household and aware that any misstep could trigger their wrath. The dogs owned by Lillian and Gus went wherever they pleased, squirming around the legs of guests even on special holidays and sometimes nipping at people’s ankles.

  Of course the rivalry played itself out in the kitchen, especially between Florence and Adele. Each had dishes she was known for, dishes that, everyone in the extended family agreed, she
did better than anyone else. This agreement wasn’t acknowledged when the women were around, but it was made clear to them by how much of something family members ate, by how often family members mentioned it and pined for it when they knew it was scheduled to be served on an upcoming night or holiday.

  Florence’s frittata, an audaciously dense omelet with green and red peppers and locatelli Romano cheese, was mentioned very often, to Adele’s obvious consternation.

  “I could make a frittata like that,” she would sniff, “if I used four dozen eggs.”

  Florence was also famous in the family for her breaded, fried veal cutlets, which had to be drained on, and pressed between, brown paper grocery bags, not paper towels, because paper towels weren’t to her mind as effective. She was famous, too, for her homemade ravioli, filled with ricotta and herbs. They were gorgeous, perfect: each one the same size, because she used the rim of a glass to cut the circles of dough from a long sheet. Each one also had the same cinching around the edges, the same pattern of dimples, made in a meticulous fashion with the tines of a fork.

  Lillian made ravioli, too, but she didn’t have Florence’s patience. So she improvised with the implements she used to trace and cut each raviolo. She traded the kind of glass Florence used for a small bowl, then the small bowl for a bigger bowl, these changes lessening the number of ravioli she needed to make. Over time her ravioli grew so big that one per person was nearly enough, and the filling would seep or poke through the envelope of pasta, because a raviolo this sprawling was a raviolo on borrowed time.