He flails around, then sits up, yelling, “You bitch! You want to know why I want out of our marriage? This is why I want out our marriage.”
I stand in the dark and listen to him yell, but he might as well be someone else’s husband yelling somewhere down the street.
I rewrap the cake and hide it in the trash, where—I really mean it this time—I wouldn’t touch it if my guru had baked it for me with her own 99.9 percent nonfat hands.
I take myself back to bed and lie in the dark, making a list of everything Thad’s done wrong in my life. This does not help me relax.
DAY
2
Exercise: It’s light out, and a minute ago it wasn’t. That means I slept. It means I can get up.
I lift Rosie from her crib and change her. I listen to Thad groaning on the couch.
He’s somebody I read about in the newspaper, I tell myself. He has nothing to do with me.
No, he’s one of the articles I skipped. He wasn’t worth reading.
I burst into tears.
My diet book is lying open on the kitchen counter. I rub my eyes dry and open it.
Snacking doesn’t have to make you fat, it says. Keep a supply of low-calorie snack foods on hand and eat them in moderation.
Right, I think. And hide them in the laundry hamper. It adds a thrill to the snacking experience.
For breakfast I’m supposed to eat a poached egg again, plus one slice of cinnamon raisin toast spread with a tablespoon of unsweetened apple sauce and half a kiwi fruit.
I check to see if the diet fairies have delivered the slice of raisin bread, because when I shopped yesterday I couldn’t see buying a whole loaf just to eat a single slice, especially when I already had a perfectly good loaf of multigrain at home. The diet fairies have failed me, though. You can’t rely on diet fairies any more than you can rely on husbands.
I drop a slice of multigrain in the toaster. Thad’s in the bathroom, gargling. He doesn’t care if I’m a pudge or a pencil. He’s having trouble with the whole idea of marriage things.
I can forget the diet.
It’s not a diet, my guru says.
I can forget her too.
The toast pops up. I stare at it.
Thad spits in the bathroom sink.
“And could you just once close the bathroom door?” I bellow.
To hell with him, I’ll lose weight anyway. For myself. Because I want to. Because it’s a Life Journey. Because he’ll feel like shit when he sees how good I look.
So there.
Breakfast: coffee with 3 drops of cream; 2 bites of dry multigrain toast, which tastes like flannel.
Exercise: I pretend to eat a bite of baby cereal. I try to say “mmmm” but only get the first two Ms out before I weep.
Thad grumbles his way into the kitchen, complaining about his back, the couch, how long it took him to get back to sleep last night. I snatch Rosie up and run to the bedroom, sobbing.
I wait for him to follow.
When he doesn’t, I nurse Rosie. Her hair’s like velvet, and I stroke it with one finger. Has any child ever been more beautiful?
Thad moves through the kitchen, and I follow his progress by the noises he makes as clearly as if I could see him, making sure he finds everything he needs.
Why do I care if he eats? I ask myself. Let the diet fairies feed him.
After what seems like a long time, he appears in the doorway.
“Listen,” he says. “About last night—”
For an instant, I see myself standing above him with that slice of cake.
“No, it was me,” I say. “I shouldn’t—”
He says, “Well, actually—”
The apology he owes me is hidden in the part of the sentence he doesn’t finish. I can almost hear it. If I listen very carefully.
“I’ll look for an apartment,” he says.
I feel nothing, and I notice this as clearly as I noticed the leaves last night.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I’ll move in with my parents.”
I wait for him to tell me how generous this is. I don’t mention that without his paycheck I’d have to move in with them anyway.
He opens the closet door and looks in.
“’F you like,” he says to the wooden hangers we bought for his suits and to the clean, ironed shirts I hung there for him.
For a long time after he leaves the house, I sit on the bed holding Rosie. When she gets cranky, I walk her around the house and stare at all the things that belong to Thad and me. They’re very nice things. Nicer than my parents ever had, and that seemed like a big deal when we were buying them: Look at us buying a goose-down comforter and Mikasa dishes. Look at me moving up in the world. Doesn’t Thad just love me? Isn’t spending money sexy? I move from one object to the next, touching each, remembering how it connects me to Thad, remembering how it helped make me into the person I wanted to be back then.
Who now makes my skin crawl.
I look away from the things and study the leaves outside the window, which were so perfect last night.
They’re just leaves.
I dial my mother’s number at work, start to cry, and hang up before she answers.
I do that three times.
Calories burned: 1. Possibly 2.
I dig what’s left of the cake out of the trash and check that it’s wrapped tightly.
Snack: the rest of the cake.
Exercise: I play with Rosie, put Rosie down for a nap, dial my mother, and hang up again.
Snack: frosting I scraped off the inside of the plastic wrap with my finger.
Exercise: I tell my diet guru to get stuffed.
With the dishrag, I scrape last night’s cake off the couch, the floor, and the pillow and blanket Thad left on the couch, then I shake cake crumbs from the dishrag into the trash and empty coffee grounds on top.
I rinse the dishrag.
There: I’m free of the cake.
I rinse the blanket and pillowcase and toss them in the dryer. As long as I’m in the basement, I put a load of shirts in the washer.
Rosie wakes up, and I play with her. Instead of checking the diet book for my meal plan, I warm a can of defatted chicken broth on the stove while my invisible friend tuts.
Lunch: 3 spoonfuls of defatted chicken broth.
Exercise: I pour the rest of the broth down the drain.
Rosie’s on the floor and she’s not crying, but she’s restless. I pick her up.
Do something, I tell myself.
Do what? myself asks.
Anything, I answer. It doesn’t matter.
With Rosie on one hip, I open the refrigerator and pull out the nonfat foods I bought yesterday. I line them up on the counter, where they face me like a firing squad.
Snack: 1 fingerful each of nonfat sour cream, nonfat cream cheese, and nonfat mayonnaise; 1 corner of a nonfat American cheese slice.
Exercise: