All I ever thought about was the food that I couldn’t eat. Sometimes I even dreamt about it. Dieting is hard. That’s why everyone admires someone who is successful at it. I had thought my mother would be proud of my precision and my calculations, my self-control, but I had the sense that she thought I was out of control. As I sat down to a tablespoon of dry turkey and watched my mother and grandmother eat the dish they had always made to welcome me home, I wondered if her thoughts were correct. I wondered if I was out of control. If I couldn’t eat a scoop of stir-fry because I was terrified of getting fat, then who was in control?
23
What did you eat last night?
I WOKE UP at 5:00 a.m. to a quiet, dark house and rummaged through my suitcase for my gym shorts and sneakers. It was time to go running. I wanted to get my workout out of the way so I could see Sacha and my old friend Bill and spend some time with my brother, who was coming home later that morning. I ran down the same roads as I did the day before and thought about how proud Sacha would be when she saw me. The last time we’d seen each other was in St. Barths when I was fat and struggling—at first with her rejection of my advances toward her, but my struggle with my weight closely followed. Of the two issues, my weight problem was the more painful. Her rejection of me didn’t hurt my feelings; rather, it clarified my feelings toward her. I was never in love with her. I was merely in love with the idea of being in a relationship with a woman. Over piña coladas, she’d helped me arrive at the conclusion that my future girlfriend would have to be a gay woman, not a straight one. I knew that once I had made enough money where I no longer had to worry about losing my career, I would find a girlfriend. I needed a lot of money, however, because I had an apartment to renovate. But after that, I would find someone to love.
I ran with money in my shoe this time. I wasn’t going to be caught again. Besides, I thought it would be nice to eat breakfast at my favorite outdoor café. As well as money, I brought cigarettes so I could run and look forward to ending my workout with a cup of hot coffee and a cigarette. The workout gear I wore for the run made me invisible. It worked as a kind of disguise. No one looked at a girl running in spandex shorts and tennis shoes even if she was running up and down a busy shopping street. Unlike the day before, I could run past the bookstore and McDonald’s without turning a head. It is strange that clothes can make that much of a difference.
I stood at the counter of the café and waited to get the attention of the owner. When he finally saw me, I didn’t know whether to acknowledge him with a warm smile that suggested we knew each other or just skip the smile and get my coffee. I decided on the latter as it’s always very embarrassing when people don’t smile back because they are too busy wondering who you are. I used to go there a lot, and although we’d never officially met, he seemed to recognize me when I was with my mother. She’s the friendly one in the family.
“Black coffee, please.”
“Coming right up.” He turned his back to me to pour the coffee, but when he turned around again with a big smile on his face it was clear that he had remembered me.
“Back from America, are ya?”
“Yep. Back home for Christmas.”
“Geez!” He blatantly looked me up and down. “Don’t they feed ya in Hollywood?”
I couldn’t think of a joke. I didn’t know what to say.
“How much is that?”
“For you, love, it’s free.”
I thanked him and took my coffee outside. I found a spot in a cluster of iron tables and chairs separated from the parking lot by a potted boxwood hedge. A couple was sitting at the next table very close to mine, and as I took out the cigarette to light it, I wondered if I should be polite and ask for their approval or just do it and hope I could get a few drags in before they complained. Doing what I wanted without permission and then dealing with the fallout was the method I’d always used with my brother. If I wanted to wear his favorite sweater, the one that he’d never let me borrow in a million years, I’d just take it and deal with the consequences. I liked to think I had grown up a lot since then, but it occurred to me my lighting that cigarette was the same principle. As it turned out, the couple next to me didn’t mind the smoke and so I sat there, inhaling smoke and nicotine and feeling quite elated that I was home in Australia with its easygoing people and its trees and its birds with their raucous singing. I would see Sacha later in the day and . . .
“I thought you might like a good Aussie breakfast! Here’s some eggs, love. Put a little meat on your bones!”
The owner of the café shoved a white porcelain plate on the metal table in front of me, interrupting my thoughts. Then he dropped a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin next to the plate. On the plate were two eggs, two big orange eyeballs of yolk staring up at me confrontationally, as if looking for a fight. I was too shocked and speechless to send them back immediately and so I was left looking at the eggs as they looked back at me, challenging me to make them disappear. I looked at the planter box filled with the boxwood hedge and wondered if eggs would somehow dissolve into the soil, or if the dirt was loose enough that I could cover up the evidence, but upon feeling the soil I found that it was too tightly packed and almost to the top of the planter. Besides, even if I could cut them up into millions of pieces, how could I get them in there without people seeing me? The café owner came back out to the patio again to deliver food to another table. He winked at me. “On the house,” he said quietly so the other customers couldn’t hear. For a brief moment I considered eating them just to save him from hurt feelings as he clearly liked his self-appointed role of a nurturing café owner who derived pleasure from seeing people enjoy his food. But that thought was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to break my diet for a man who, only moments before, I’d been scared to acknowledge with a nod for fear he wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t going to break my diet for that guy.
Disposing of the eggs into the planter wasn’t an option and there was no trash can on the patio, so I was left with either cutting the eggs up into tiny pieces and moving the pieces around on the plate to make it look like I’d eaten some or leaving them whole and coming up with a reason for not wanting them, other than the obvious one, which was that I didn’t order them. The longer I was confronted with this unsolicited situation, his so-called generosity, the angrier I became. It was quite disrespectful of him, actually, to feed me like this, as if I were a child. I was an adult capable of making my own decisions about what went into my body. I decided that I wasn’t even going to attempt to please him. I was going to leave the eggs exactly as they were delivered to me. Now he could deal with not knowing what to do with the two monstrous, confrontational eyelike yolks. My only dilemma was how to appear normal, and as normal people are greedy and love receiving free things, how would I spin this? Who wouldn’t want free food? Who wouldn’t want free deliciously fresh eggs with their coffee? I found the perfect answer to this riddle just as he came out to check on me.
“Thank you so much for the eggs, but I’m vegan. I don’t eat any animal products.”
“Vegan.” He said the word like he was hearing it for the first time, repeating it as if to get it right. He shook his head. “God, you Hollywood people are a bunch of weirdos.”
I laughed at what I assumed was a joke and got up from the table to end this awkward interaction where I was force-fed and called a skinny weirdo. All I had wanted was to sit peacefully and bask in the joy of being home and instead I was ambushed by this Australian weirdo who thought he knew better than I did about what I needed. I jogged home and arrived just as a cab delivered my brother from the airport to the house where we had spent our teenage years ignoring each other.