Good Enough to Eat by Stacey Ballis

Author:Stacey Ballis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

This is the longest meal I’ve ever suffered through, and if Nathan Gershowitz pinches my thigh one more time under the table, or nudges me with his foot, or goes into the kitchen to get something and raises his eyebrows at me over Nadia’s and Daniel’s heads, I’m going to fucking punch him in the throat.

Daniel arrived forty minutes late, by which time the tenor of the evening had already slid downhill. Nate, thinking he was helping me out with my curiosity problem, basically spent those uncomfortable forty minutes interrogating Nadia with all of his investigative skills. She deftly answered all his questions about family and background and history without actually giving away any information. And since he is a documentarian, he couldn’t let it go. The more she dodged sharing real info, the more he pressed. “What did your dad do for a living?” “What did you do for Christmas?” “Where do your siblings live?” He was relentless, and Nadia, who had been sitting straight and feeling confident, and ready to take on confronting her guy, sank into the couch, her shoulders dropped, her eyes unsparkled. I grabbed Nate and asked him to help in the kitchen, and whispered for him to knock it off, but I didn’t really do it in a very nice way, so he narrowed his eyes at me and clearly was irritated. By the time Daniel finally arrived, we were all grateful for what we assumed would be the relief of a new person.

Not to be.

Nadia was now really nervous, and Nate made no less than three snarky jokes about Daniel being late, including one where he implied that her boyfriend was so excited to see her he clearly forgot where she lived. Daniel is as quirky as one would expect, based on Nadia’s description, and has alternated between not participating at all in the conversation and giving long, incomprehensible monologues related to the inner workings of computers and his admiration of some guy he calls The Woz. He picked all the apples out of his salad, and left the rest. “Celery. No. No food with strings.” He separated the meatballs on one side of his plate, and the pasta on the other, ate the pasta one strand at a time, and waited till it was gone to eat the meatballs. “Don’t really like to mix my foods.”

He also brought every other bite to his nose and sniffed deeply before eating.

On the one hand, I’m sort of grateful for his peculiarities, since Nate seems now more interested in poking at me to indicate some sort of amazement at this kid’s oddities than in being irritated at me for chiding him. On the other, I’m watching Nadia practically disappear she is getting so small, and she is inhaling everything in sight, taking huge second and third helpings, which makes me very concerned, since bulimia, like any eating disorder, never goes away, never leaves your psyche, and this bingeing behavior might lead to a relapse.

I take advantage of the current lull in conversation to ask if everyone has finished with the main course.

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