Page 11 of The Husband Diet
And please, let Warren be a patient man, and be kind to his wife and children, even if she isn’t a raging beauty. Let him understand the beauty inside people.
I sat on a kitchen stool with a glass of wine, observing my mini three-dollar-each succulent cacti plants, perfectly aligned like little soldiers on the kitchen windowsill, their thorns sticking out proudly as if to say, look at us – we don’t need Erica’s TLC! We can survive without water! And boy, could they. I’d forget to water them for weeks and they’d be there for me, resistant, alive and beautiful, even with little purple or pink flowers sticking out from the top, no matter how much I neglected them.
I wish my poor kids knew the same survival techniques, but I guess I was asking too much. Hell, I wishIknew them. Look at me – I can survive without sex with my husband! What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Maybe one day I’d have time to plant a beautiful rose bush right by the front door, so every time I came home I’d be greeted by beauty. Roses, the symbol of love. I sighed. Life wasn’t perfect and if I had no sex life, there were also other things I still had to master – like being the prefect wife. I was trying with all my heart. In any case, I always had plan B: envisioning the day my fantasies of killing my husband became reality. God, sometimes life was a pain in the ass.
4
Mother Marcy?
‘Ira told me you’re still refusing surgery. Really, Erica, it’s the least you could do to save your marriage,’ my mom scolded me as she took a sip of her Martini.
I glared at my mother, sitting in her size four YSL designer number opposite me at lunch at The Farthington Hotel, my domain. She never came to see me at work, so I’d figured it must be something important, namely her next shopping spree in Europe.
Marcy had never really been a hands-on mother, particularly with me. Sometimes it seemed she simply tolerated my existence, from my birth all the way up until… well, now. But at the same time, she doted on her only son, Vince, and shared a fashion fever with my sister, Judy, with whom she still can be seen today storming the designer shops in the city center.
Marcy didn’t want to be called mum by any of us and even her seven grandchildren had to call her Marcy. She can’t stand the sight of elderly people because she was terrified of aging and had never said anything nice about the way I looked (although I couldn’t blame her most of the time) and my lifestyle choices.
At leastIgot out of bed every morning and earned myself a living, as opposed to Marcy, who had my dad to keep her in sexy negligees and shiny kimonos until noon at fifty-nine years of age (I’m not kidding you) and designer numbers in size four. (Four? Four! How the hell did she give birth to three kids and stay a size four? She didn’t exercise, and she smoked and drank like a stevedore.) And here I was, a glorious size twenty and ever dodging the umpteenth diet.
If it hadn’t been for my nonna Silvia and my mum’s three sisters, Zia Maria, Zia Martina and Zia Monica, we’d have certainly died. My siblings, Judy and Vince, of malnutrition and me of obesity (I was the only one smart enough to have a stash of junk food under my bed). And here she was talking down to me as usual, under the pretense of exasperated motherly love.
‘What will it take for you to understand that you can’t keep a man, looking like you do?’
I sighed. Yes, we all knew I was big, thank you very much. But I’d tried to lose weight. God knew I’d tried and tried and tried. And failed and failed and failed. I couldn’t seem to stay disciplined. Wasn’t I making enough sacrifices in my life as it was? What was wrong with indulging in a little cream puff at the end of a long, hard day during which I’d done both the manager’s shiftandplayed the homemaker, saving the hotel from yet another disaster while keeping the kids from climbing the walls?
OK, so sweets were killing me instead of helping me improve the quality of my life. Maybe if I renounced one every now and then… No. I had to renounce them entirely. For my health. It was time to admit defeat. Even I could see that. But hell, was it too much expecting my husband still to love me in the process?
It wasn’t as if he was an Adonis himself. He was now balding, bad-tempered and almost scrawny – nothing like the guy I’d fallen in love with. Back then, he was good-looking, charming, ambitious and sexy. And so was I. We’d been, I used to think, a perfect fit. But the years hadn’t been kind to us – neither physically nor emotionally.
‘Don’t you think it’s time, Erica?’ Marcy persisted.
‘Time for what?’ I replied as I swallowed a generous forkful of shrimp salad. I loved the pink sauce.
She took a sip of her Martini and rolled her eyes. ‘To lose weight, of course. Think of how your love life would improve – think of the sex.’
‘Eww. I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation with you,’ I said, raising my evil eyebrow at her.
She shrugged her slim silk-covered shoulders, so glamorous she’d put any Hollywood star to shame.
‘I’m just saying. Your whole life would improve if you lost weight. So please at least consider the option of surgery. You’d see the results in a matter of months. And think of theclothes.’
I squirmed involuntarily. There it was – clothes. Her dream – my nightmare since childhood. Marcy dragging me to Macy’s was still one of my most traumatizing early-life experiences. Nothing pleased her. When I tried something on, she’d tut and shake her head, asking the salesladies, in a very loud voice, if there was alargersize. And when they coughed and whispered that there wasn’t, she’d check the seams to see if the outfit could be widened (by my grandmother Silvia or aunt Martina, of course – Marcy couldn’t sew a stitch to save herself and still can’t today).
Then, totally mortified, I’d look at the beloved item and mumble, ‘You know, I really don’t like it anyway.’
At which point she’d open her mouth to say something but think better of it.
Sometimes there would be a party and I’d have to get a fancy outfit, usually a dress. My after-school look was baggy jeans and a T-shirt, but I wasn’t blind. I saw the nice accessories and stuff, and my arty soul was already longingly matching this with that item as I walked past the racks, pretending not to care my size was, for a kid my age, unheard of, nor that I’d forever be Miss Fashion Pariah.
So glitzy Marcy would sigh. ‘Go into the changing room, get undressed and I’ll bring you whatever I can find.’ Then she’d turn to the sales reps. ‘Ladies, I’ll needallthe help I can get from you today.’
Do you know how many times I stood there behind Macy’s dressing room drapes, practically naked at Marcy’s mercy, with that offending neon light and those deforming circus mirrors pointing at my butt, waiting for her to find a piece of cloth that could manage to span the width of my body?
Now keep in mind that it’smymom we’re talking about and not, say, yours, who was probably thrilled to see you in a nice dress, looking all pretty and waiting for your prom date. (My boyfriend, Peter DeVita, the only one I’d ever had up until then, moved away just before my prom.)
And every season the same story. I was sick of it. As much as I liked fashionable clothes, I didn’t want them if they were going to cost me so much pain and humiliation. So in the years that followed, I bought an incredible number of shoes and bags, all cool and fashionable.
