Despertar

what's cookin'

You asked.

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My dad was poor when he grew up in a section of Detroit that doesn't even exist anymore--it burnt down in the nineties and no one bothered rebuilding it. They had to live there because they were poor, and they were poor because they were living on the salaries of an eighth-grade dropout and a nurse who had to work the lower-paying night shift because she had graduated from the colored school.

They weren't fried-wildflowers poor, but they were definitely sugar-sandwiches poor, and, occasionally, dog-food poor. I don't know, actually, how those depths of poverty stack up relative to each other. If they'd lived someplace with dirt and grass, would my grandmother have taught her four children to fry wildflowers during her late-night absences, or when her husband was too drunk to find his way to the kitchen? Impossible to know, at this point. Anyway, though, there was never enough of anything, so my dad and his siblings learned to be creative with what there was. Not enough bedrooms? Roll out bath towels and sleep on the kitchen floor. Not enough money to buy cookies for dessert? Moisten half a slice of bread, sprinkle with granulated sugar, fold over, eat. Sometimes, in his better days, my grandfather served fish he'd caught in the St. Clair River. I'm sure they would have qualified for what my grandmother disdainfully referred to as guhment cheese, but that is not how things were done in that house. They just made do with what they had, or didn't have.

But what seems to happen, when you teach a kid that some things necessary to sustenance are worth struggling for, is that his relationship with those things takes on a weird, desperate turn. There wasn't enough space in that house, and the four kids who grew up in it couldn't wait to get out and glut themselves on everything they hadn't had much of. Deprivation bred overconsumption. Not one of them had, or has, an off switch.

My dad's oldest sister glutted herself on stuff. She has thirteen dogs and cats, and every single thing she's ever owned in her life--article of clothing, decoration, dish and knickknack--is still crammed someplace in her house. She looks, acts and smells like someone who doesn't know what's worth keeping and what isn't.

The second sister glutted herself on space. She went to college for a while, then turned completely wild, bouncing from place to place doing sketchy modeling jobs and go-go dancing in Motown-era nightclubs. She sometimes didn't contact her family for months at a time, then, once, was gone long enough to return with a two-year-old child whose existence no one had even known to anticipate. And then she died when she was thirty-six.

My dad's brother was a heroin addict. And what is addiction, really, if not (involuntary) overconsumption?

And then, my dad. The sugar sandwiches fucked his teeth right up, but that didn't stop him from developing the strongest sweet tooth I've ever seen on a living human. He's getting better now that he's in his fifties, but the relationship my dad used to have with food was indescribable. He does not believe in any of the contemporary methods of weight control, does not count calories, does not limit the sizes of his portions. Besides the occasional two-week period when he tries to cut out red meat, my dad has never, to my knowledge, not eaten anything that was offered to him or for which he developed a random craving. Nor does he let biological need dictate when he's going to start or stop eating, nor does he consider whether the amount of food available, and the number of people it has to feed, means maybe he shouldn't get thirds on everything. And the way he eats is, I imagine, the way an Olympian eats after a four-hour training session. Stuff flies everywhere. No one taught him manners, so the noises he makes at the dinner table are unthinkable. He regularly leaves the table with sauce and crumbs all over his clothes, giving the impression that he was so desperate to consume what was before him, he did it by any means necessary.

If nostalgia is the memory of food eaten in childhood, then shmeeves are the manifestation of every unpleasant experience one had to endure in childhood. My dad is why nothing hurts my eardrums more, in that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard way, than to hear someone chewing. When I was nine, and realized I had never seen anyone as fat as my dad in old age, I developed, pretty much overnight, a crippling, all-consuming fear that my dad was going to bite into a hamburger and explode. Then Uncle Phil bit into a hamburger and had a heart attack on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and my fear refined itself. The way he and I interact when food is involved...defies explanation. Our father-daughter relationship has literally deteriorated around my parents' dinner table, my least favorite place on earth, where I feel like if we make eye contact, I'm going to burst into tears. Where I constantly feel on the verge of jumping out of my own skin. We have not gotten along well for years, and I'm sure he has no idea why. He probably thinks I hate him, instead of understanding that I love him and hate food.

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Nothing ever dies with the generation where it originated. My grandfather's propensity for addiction is milder in me, but I fight it, constantly, the natural need to obsess.

It's the opposite thing, with me. I've always had too much of everything. When I was growing up, our fridge was stocked as well as a tiny grocery store. Anything I could think of, anything I ever wanted to eat, it was in there, which was nice before I hit that turning point where food became a symbol of everything that was confusing and miserable about my family. Had there not been enough food, I'm sure I would have obsessed about getting more of it, or, like my dad, vowed to someday have a fridge I could keep full of it. Growing up with a constant abundance of everything, I instead obsessed over eating less of it. Over learning to live while disregarding it as much as possible.

Then, high school. Skinny girls with nonblack body types, their thighs and butts naturally smaller than mine no matter how big they were on top.

Then, college. Losing sleep and every appetite over Marcus, who, ironically, probably would have liked me better with more meat on my bones.

I was a solid size zero when I started law school. A year of delicious Chinese food and fruity cocktails later, I was a size two who could sometimes still fit into her own well-worn zeroes. That was fine with me. I became a gym head to tone and keep my energy up, rather than to lose weight. The happier and more well-adjusted I got, the tighter the zeroes got, till last semester when I retired them forever. Still fine with me; I just wanted to stay in twos. I stepped up my gym routine and my focus changed: I was fine with the width of my hips and the fact that I suddenly had boobs, but wanted smaller thighs, sharper calves, et cetera.

Then, summer. Missed like two weeks of the gym, gained about a gazillion pounds.

Then, yesterday, back-to-school shopping at Express, the one store where I can normally try on pants without winding up in tears. I had been to several stores already, had tried on a bunch of tops, and my head was filled with this ticker-tape thought: Must eat less, exercise more, consume about twenty gallons of water. Must flush out all this stomach fat. My thoughts would not budge away from my fat stomach, so it didn't occur to me that maybe I was feeling too vulnerable to try on pants. (For the men reading, if you still are, I'm sure you are lost, but trying on pants, for women, is one of the most emotionally engaging experiences there is.)

The twos, that I picked up? Barely got over my thighs. The second pair, in the more forgiving dark wash? Slid about halfway up, and that was it. The third pair? Wouldn't zip, and I could hear the seams pulling.

In total panic, I bought two pairs of them. Since then, just since then, I have reverted to my old obsessed self, and I have not stopped thinking about food. About how much I hate it and what a rough spot we two are heading into this fall. Because, and I promise I'm not teaching myself to purge or joining any pro-ana message boards, but there's nothing anyone is going to be able to say to change this, I HAVE to get into those pants.

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And that's what's cookin'!