Hunger Point Read online

  For me, the worst is over. I still feel sometimes that my mother loves food more than she loves me, but I realize that it’s not eating or even being thin that’s so enticing to her. For my mom, it’s the ritual: the fervent devotion to weight-loss success stories; the self-righteous exchange of a gooey brownie for its sugar-free substitute; the sweet surrender of eating off plates after guests leave; and the unfailing reverence for Monday mornings, the beginning of a new week of dieting. Despite her Jewish upbringing, this is my mother’s religion. And because she needs it so much, I let her have it.

  I’m all grown up now. I’m careful about what I eat, and I do worry about calories and fat grams, but I don’t obsess about trying to fit a size ten body into size six jeans. At this point, I have more important things on my plate, so to speak. I don’t know why I, unlike Shelly, was able to escape the torment of my body, because neither of us seemed able to rid ourselves of the torment of our mother. Maybe I just outgrew all that nonsense about cellulite and trailer parks and boys who won’t call girls whose legs are too fat. But that’s me. Unfortunately, my little sister Shelly wasn’t so lucky.

  PART ONE

  CHAOS

  1

  My mother, Marsha, claims she takes tranquilizers only as a last resort. “I don’t need them,” she tells me. “They just take the edge off. It’s a choice,” she adds. “A conscious choice.”

  She’s downstairs with my father, David, drinking decaf from her Life’s a Beach mug. Lying in bed, I start to rise, but slump back, knowing what awaits me. My mother will be on the phone with her sister Lillian, ranting about the stupid house painter she hired who used magenta on the shutters instead of the dusty rose she picked out. Hunched over the table, my father will read the New York Times from cover to cover, then he’ll agonize over the Word Jumble in the Daily News. He’ll go to the refrigerator, but when he tries to get back to his seat, he’ll be blocked by the phone cord that stretches across the kitchen like barbed wire. He’ll ask my mother in a voice as tight as the cord to kindly move into the den if she wants to use the phone. Rolling her eyes, she’ll pull the cord up and over his body so he can pass.

  I know I have to get out of bed; however, I’m smart enough at twenty-six to recognize that though their behavior hasn’t changed, my presence at the breakfast table is absurd. They may love me, but I also know they view me as a houseguest who is turning a weekend stay into an all-expense-paid lifelong residency, and who (to their horror) constantly forgets to flush the toilet and shut off the lights.

  My phone rings. “Frannie? It’s eight-thirty. You asked me to wake you at eight-thirty.” My mother is calling from the downstairs line. When I moved home two weeks ago, she reinstalled my old line, which I thought was a nice gesture on her part. “And don’t forget to shut your curlers off,” she continues. “I found them on the other day. You could have burned the whole house down.”

  “I won’t,” I tell her, wondering when I left my curlers on. We’re alike in that respect, always worrying about the house burning down. The truth is, I rarely use curlers in my hair since I have nowhere to go except to Rascals, a restaurant in the mall where I work three nights a week.

  My mother took the day off from work, and we are spending it together. Sharing what she calls a Day at the Spa. We are getting our hair cut, our nails done, and then we’ll sit in the sauna and pretend not to look at each other’s bodies. She is treating us to Spa Day to balance the afternoon, which will be spent with my sister, Shelly, who checked herself into St. Mary’s Hospital last week, and is now allowed visitors. It’s not that I don’t want to see my sister; I’m just not ready to see her in her present living situation. Although, if pressed, I’m sure she’d say the same thing about me.

  Recently laid off from my secretarial job at Revlon, I first posed the question of moving back home when my mother was bedridden after a facelift. I whipped up fat-free smoothies, agreed when she said Oprah was putting on weight, rubbed vitamin E on her stitches, and caught her up on General Hospital. Because she was groggy, it didn’t dawn on her until I was well into how Luke and Laura met that I should have been at work. “Frannie,” she asked me, “why do you know so much about this show?”

  “We watch it in the conference room. I called in sick today to be with you. We could have fun all the time if I lived here again. What do you think?”

  “What do I think about what?”

  I rested my head on her shoulder. Her head was swaddled in bandages so I tried to be careful. “We could be roomies again. My lease is up, but we both know I can’t afford that apartment. If I move back, I can save money and keep you company. You seem so lonely.”

  “I’ll be back at work in a week,” she said, pulling away. “I’m hardly lonely. What about moving in with Abby?” Abby, who I’ve known since elementary school, is my best friend and has her own shoebox-sized apartment on Madison Avenue.

  “You’ve seen Abby’s place. She can barely fit her own stuff in there. Come on, Mom. You can teach me all about real estate.” I’ll waitress while I look for a day job, I decided. Then at least she’ll think I’m trying.

  “You’re serious about this?”

  I nodded. She peered at me suspiciously through the gauze. “Since when do you want to be in real estate?”

  “You don’t think I’d be good at real estate?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said—”

  “Mom,” I interrupted, “this could be good for us. You’re moving into your Golden Years. We won’t ever have this time together again.”

  She didn’t answer me at first. Then she said, “You’re always welcome here, Frannie. But Daddy and I are used to our own way of doing things.”

  “So you don’t want me to move home.” I felt a pang of panic, wanting her to beg me.

  “I didn’t say that. You can move home, but it can only be temporary. We’re too old to live side by side.”

  “It will be temporary, I promise.” I grinned. “Think about it, Mom, it’ll be like old times. We’ll have a ball.”

  “Yippee,” my mother muttered, adjusting her bandages. “Like old times.” What we didn’t say was that she let me move home because she was freaked about Shelly, nor did we mention that I was asking to do it because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, being broke, without health insurance, and adamantly opposed to living without cable.

  I roll over. My feet get cold from the sudden draft, and I curl up under the sheet. My twin bed is old, and the springs are so worn that if I put my hand on the floor, I can actually do a push-up, the mattress rising with my body as if it is a person moving beneath me. It’s rough sleeping alone after having boys to roll around with. And it’s pathetic, I know, to fantasize about having sex with a strapping young man with my parents next door, but I obsess all the time. I imagine him running his fingers across my lips, caressing my thighs, cupping my breasts, whispering to me in a voice soft as rainfall…

  “FRANNIE! We have a big day.” She’s closing in on me, tapping her nails on the banister.

  “Stick a Pop-Tart in the toaster, Mom!” I yell. “I’ll be right down.” I groan as I tug on the nightgown I found balled in my closet. What was once a beautiful silk nightdress is now hooker attire. The empire waist pushes my breasts up so high, they peek out the arms. The thin material clings, and strings from the unraveled hem hang like fringe. But it’s soft and smells faintly of Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo, so I sleep in it. Bracing myself, I put on a robe and head downstairs to greet the family and partake of the breakfast hour.

  “Daddy forgot to buy you Pop-Tarts.” My mother picks up the phone. “Do you realize how much fat is in one Pop-Tart? Have toast. Daddy bought sugar-free jelly.”

  “Toast is fine,” I tell her, looking at my father, who is engrossed in the paper. He does all the grocery shopping for the household. Obsessed with cooking, he spends hours poring over recipes. A number of times, I’ve walked in on him watching Julia Child. He hunches forward boyishly on the couch, his
mouth hanging open, staring at the television screen as if catatonic.

  I rummage through the pantry, wondering if my mother hid my Pop-Tarts. I can’t understand why it is so hard for my father to remember the most simple things about me. I am happy to buy my own, believe me, but he makes such a big goddamn deal about it. “I’ll do the food shopping,” he says firmly, spreading coupons around the table like it’s his own little kingdom. Then he doesn’t even listen when I ask him for something. For a second I consider that my parents have conferred about this, but I know that’s impossible since they rarely speak to each other.

  “Put something on your feet,” my father says as I walk to the table. “The floor is freezing.”

  “I’m fine, really.” I slide a piece of the paper away from him. He cuts his toast into four perfect squares and scrapes each one with guava jelly. The sound grates on me like a rusty wheel. My father, though thin and unimposing, is the world’s loudest eater, and can be ten times more annoying with a piece of toast and a cup of coffee than if he crouched on the table and brayed like a donkey.

  One thing about my parents that is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying is how obsessively they take care of themselves. My father sits on the driveway for hours with an aluminum sunboard, and looks like a tanner, taller version of Buddy Holly. My mother, through a vigilant combination of Weight Watchers, the Zone, recipes from Oprah’s kitchen, and the StairMaster, has maintained a shapely, middle-aged figure. And they both sport full heads of hair that they attend to with the painstaking devotion of botanical gardeners.

  Shelly was blessed with my father’s long legs and Nordic coloring but I inherited my mother’s predisposition to the pear-shaped hips of Russian immigrants. People often remark that from far away, the four of us could be siblings. But appearances can be deceiving. If you look closely, you can see dark pouches around my father’s eyes and the way lipstick bleeds into tiny wrinkles around my mother’s mouth. And now that she’s had a facelift, her skin is tight around her eyes and her small mouth gapes open like a clam when she speaks.

  “Spa Day starts at nine-thirty, Frannie. Hair at ten, nails at eleven. In fact,” my mother says slyly, “I’ve made appointments for us to have massages.” She waits a beat, expecting me to be thrilled.

  “I don’t think I can go today, Mom,” I say nervously. The decision wasn’t easy to make since I have a few problems with the power of choice. I know I should go, if only to be nice and satisfy her sudden urges for mother-daughter outings. Shoe-shopping and bed and bath boutiques are fine, but it drives me mad to watch her flit around the beauty parlor, reminding everyone that Shelly is applying to Harvard Law in the fall. “I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t think I have time to get my hair done today.” I look to my father for support. He slurps his coffee so hard, it sounds as if he has a piece of balloon stuck in his throat and can’t catch his breath. Bent so far over his mug, he looks like he is using the hot coffee to open his pores.

  “Hi, Lillian,” my mother says into the phone. “I know it’s early in Tempe, but who told you to move to Arizona? If you still lived on Long Island, you’d be on my time. Hold on.” She covers the receiver. “What do you mean you don’t want to go? Do you realize how hard it is to get two appointments with Collette in the same morning?”

  “I thought I’d call a few places about jobs,” I say slowly. “I do have to find a job, you know.”

  “Frannie, you can look for a job any day of the week. Today we made plans!” I want to tell her that I am sorry, that I know I’m being childish. Instead, I sip my coffee and count the headlines on the front page of the Times. “I did this for you. It will be fun, dammit!”

  I clench a fist to hide my raggy nails. My mother always says—Jesus, I sound like Forrest Gump—that you can tell a lot about a woman by the way she takes care of her fingers and toes. She has her nails done once a week at the Nail Lady in Lindsey Point, then she drives all the way to Manhasset to see Collette, who does her hair. Collette is my mother’s guru. I met her only once, but she made me very tense. She’s painfully thin with frizzy hair the color of patent leather and black eyes ringed so heavily with eye liner they look bruised.

  “We’ll strip it and rinse with henna,” Collette had said, cradling my mother’s head. “Then we’ll tease it—big—to give it some life, some personality. Lately it’s been looking sallow and under the weather.” They talked about my mother’s hair like it was a person to be muscled into shape. Being around Collette makes me feel like a bloated, dopey girl with trailer-park nails and a dead animal on my head.

  “Daddy.” I kick him lightly with my bare foot. “Do you think I should go today?”

  “Your mother made you an appointment,” he says, still working the Jumble. He squints at the blank spaces.

  I glance over and study it. “The word’s ACCRUE, Dad.” He raises his eyebrows in wonder and pencils it in.

  My mother hangs up and digs a spoon into a jar of sugar-free jelly. She alternates her mornings with sugar-free jelly and guava. When she’s in a good mood, she treats herself to the highly caloric guava jelly, but when she’s mad or anxious, she makes herself eat the sugar-free kind. She waves the spoon with a blob of jelly on it as she speaks. “Aunt Lillian thinks you should go. She thinks it’s great that we have the opportunity to be together. Your cousin Beth won’t even call her. And I’m paying for the whole thing.”

  “Oh, please. Beth is a coke whore who’d sell Aunt Lillian’s jewelry to pay for drugs. Aunt Lillian should consider herself lucky. You said so yourself.”

  “That’s not the point. And that’s a disgusting way to talk about your cousin. She’s still a person.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “I want to make some calls and get some things together for Shelly. I don’t have enough time to do everything. I’ll go with you next week.”

  “There is no ‘next week.’ Collette’s going to Europe.” She crams a piece of toast in her mouth, throws the jelly spoon into the sink, and walks out. “Just forget it, Frannie. Don’t go. But this is the last time I do something nice for you.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I ask my dad. “I’m saving her fifty bucks.”

  He chews on his pencil. “Your mother’s upset about Shelly. She wants to spend the morning with you. She thinks it will make her feel better.”

  “Oh,” I say quietly, knowing this of course, but wishing he hadn’t said it out loud. Suddenly feeling ungrateful and selfish, I walk to the stairs and call out that I’ve changed my mind.

  “Too late!” my mother calls back. “I canceled for you. I think it’s best if I just go by myself.”

  After my mother leaves, I grab a Hefty bag to fill with things for Shelly. My father is still sitting at the kitchen table. “Aren’t you going to work?” I ask tentatively. My dad was often unemployed as I was growing up. Territories shrunk, business was bad, the recession hit. There were a lot of reasons why. But like most salesmen, he’s resilient, so he was always able to pick up a line somewhere—clothing, eyeglasses, paper products, you name it. This year, he’s peddling novelty giftware: sweatshirts, mugs, and greeting cards, but I’ll never forget him sitting in this same spot, scouring the want ads, eating guava jelly sandwiches. I think that was when he fell in love with the Jumble.

  My dad looks up at me. “I have a meeting in the city.”

  “If you’ll be in Manhattan anyway, why don’t you come with us to see Shelly?”

  “I thought it best if you girls went first. I’ll go when she feels more settled in.”

  “You mean when she’s cured.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth, Frannie,” he says as he walks out of the kitchen.

  I can’t figure out how he feels about me being here. When I moved in, he carried all the boxes out of my apartment in Great Neck, wheezing, red-faced, up and down the stairs, but all he said was, “I’m sure you’ll find a job soon and then I’ll have to do this all over again.” He must think I’m pathetic when he sees me sitting on my bed, dw
arfing the furniture he bought at Sears fifteen years ago. But maybe, maybe I make him feel younger, and when he sees me, he just assumes I’ve been here all this time. Sometimes he hovers outside my room, about to say something, but then he just moves the door back and forth, as if checking the hinges. I pretend that he’s about to ask me if I need a ride to the mall, or if I finished my college applications, none of which he asked when I lived here the first time, the real time.

  I take the bag up to Shelly’s room, where I light a cigarette. My father’s allergic, so we don’t smoke in the house, but he’s downstairs so I doubt he can smell it.

  Random family pictures are scattered on top of Shelly’s dresser. We both have the same furniture, white with gold inlay, all the edges carved into fat curls. I pick up a photograph of Shelly, my mother, and me that my father took in Florida last year. It is a great shot of the three of us on the beach wearing sunglasses. Shelly’s in the middle, wearing an oversized windbreaker that hangs to her knees. My mother and I are in short-sleeved shirts and we have our arms around her. Shelly’s face is drawn, but it looks like she’s laughing. I think about taking the picture to the hospital, but then I remember that we were in Florida for my grandmother’s funeral. Staring at it carefully, I also remember how sunburned I was when the picture was taken, and how much it hurt to have Shelly pressed against the tender skin of my shoulder. Shelly wasn’t laughing at all. She’d just passed out, and my mom and I were holding her up because she was too weak to stand on her own. Her head is tilted, and the shadow from a lock of hair just makes it look like she’s smiling. My father put the photograph in a novelty frame. Apparently he also forgot that Shelly was practically comatose from hunger and fatigue, and crying right before the shot was taken.