Poor Man's Feast by Elissa Altman

Author:Elissa Altman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2013-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

For a lifetime, this has been the crux of the conversation for me and my mother, who turns heads wherever she goes. Lithe and elegant, as she’s been as long as I’ve known her, the fact of food, of weight, really, is still there for her, flitting around like Tinker Bell, taking up exhaustive quantities of unconscious mental time and space with hummingbirdlike energy. Constantly dieting from the day she turned fifteen—when it struck her that while no one could see how heavy she was as a 150-pound child radio singer, they certainly would see her on television, where she intended to perform, and did—her staunch enemy has been the food on her plate. She takes no comfort or joy in that food; it’s an adversary meant to be manipulated and maneuvered. Restaurants are places not to eat but to be seen, and the Stork Club, El Morocco, 21, had been some of her haunts before she married my father. I ask her what she ate on those late nights after her performances at the Copacabana were over, and what kind of food they served, and she looks at me blankly. She can tell me what she wore, down to the most minute detail; the cut, color, material, designer—even the contents of her purse. But when asked about food she goes silent and vacant. She is so terrified of eating that she has no recollection of anything that might put an ounce of weight on her needle-thin body.

“Of all things,” she cried, when I told her that I was going to work for Dean & DeLuca, “that’s what you’re going to do? I paid for you to go to college.”

“But it’s what I love, Mom,” I whined.

She winces, like she’s in pain.

“But will you have to eat everything you sell?” she squeaks, her voice getting higher and softer.

“I certainly hope not,” I say, remembering the cans of smoked grouse the store carried in its British section, which were purported to contain buckshot.

“Well, thank god for that,” she says. “I mean, surrounded by all that food, all the time, you could get fat just by being there.”

So great is her obsession with weight—whether hers or mine—that whenever I stay overnight at her house, even now, she regularly checks the tags on my clothes to see what size I’m wearing, so I clip them off to avoid discussion.

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