Moon Pie

Moon Pie

This teen hearthrob in a back issue of Vogue, with greasy hair and a Mettallica t-shirt, sneers at her and tells her, “I’m all American, baby. I’m young and hungry, and that’s the best thing you can be.” She sneers back, and continues clipping her toe-nails over his bony abdomen (no wonder he’s hungry.) She’s young. She’s hungry. And it’s dull. She doesn’t believe that it’s all the Vogue guy says it is. For her, the all encompassing ambition of American youth is a panicky and breathless exhilaration, like the over-rapid heartbeat brought on by an excess of time spent on the Stairmaster. Mostly in manifests itself in her irritability; she taps her heels at staff meetings, she fidgets at the dinner table and mashes and slices her lean cuisine to slivers.

She deals with any hungry impulses by learning to dole out her habits in moderation. She spends too much time taking puffs from other people’s cigarettes, because other people’s have no nicotine and she has far too much to do to waste any time being dead. She swirls the smoke in her mouth like a piece of white chocolate or red wine. Food she nibbles off other people’s plates, too, because they don’t have calories if you take them from someone else. She adheres to a diet program which advertises itself as being “three times as fast as anorexia.” After all, the obesity epidemic is rampant in America, and presentation counts, and she’s pretty sure that if she goes up to a size six men will not ask her out to starve herself at the best restaurants anymore (she is young and downright famished.)

She’s getting so tired of it, the pragmatic restraint. The sacrifices made for her social and personal advancement are dry and dull as a mouthful of sawdust.

She doesn’t want to be hungry anymore. She wants to be fat and languorous as an odalisque in a painting by Titian. She wants to recline over-stuffed on a nineteenth century divan and have Alfred Tennyson force feed strawberries down her throat. She wants to be lazy. Immobile. It would cause her to cultivate her tastes.

And so, she’s going to run away. From America, and from cool greasy-haired Vogue guys everywhere. She’ll take Eliot’s advice and a find a still point on the turning world.

But where will she go? France. It will have to be France. Not Paris, not any place with any speed. She’ll need to bury herself far in the South, hide beneath the grapevines, peeking out between the leaves like a wood nymph. She could put on weight and drink cheap wine and buy a husky little house whose bricks would bake in the midday sun. She’ll find love – it’s easier to find in a warm climate when it can be caught unaware sunning itself at the beach with its swimming trunks falling down about its ankles. She’ll marry, and wash laundry by hand, and hang it on lines in the back garden. Grow her hair long, and become a Grandmother. Be respected. Be quiet, and patient and content. She wishes she could think of a French heroine to emulate in that respect, but none ever appealed to her, other than Mme. Defarge.

She does it, too. She braves the final feverish swirl at the Visa office - at the airport, at the realtor – until the day she sits on an Air France plane being blown along by antiquated gales of wind.

And on that first day, when she sees her little pre-furnished brick cottage with the lilac growing around it, she breathes a great sigh of relief. She sits in the garden, and dozes under a tree. She watches the sunset. She savors. On the second day, she goes to a café, and eats brie with honey. On the third day, she decides she needs reading material, and walks into town to buy a copy of French Vogue, which she gobbles down. On the fourth day, she re-reads the Vogue, and begins to sincerely wish that something would happen. Nothing does.

After about two weeks, she finds herself eating with morbid concentration. She can fill up six hours of her day baking, but then there’s a problem of consuming the food. If she doesn’t eat it all, she won’t be able to bake the next day, and then what will she do? She starts throwing dinner parties for other American expatriates. They pat their enormous bellies and talk about how they’ve spent the day contemplating the flowers in their gardens. She thinks they may be the dullest people she’s ever met.

It’s only after she gets food poisoning from homemade foie gras that she books her plane ticket back to New York. And the world begins turning again, because that’s what the world does.

The next night, as she sits at a diner with a friend, nibbling a watercress salad and tapping her heels beneath table, she leans over and asks, “Do you think being young and American and hungry is the best thing you can be?”

Her friend pauses for a moment, before replying, “I don’t know that it’s the best thing to be. But I don’t know if there’s any other choice. Maybe if we’re young and American it’s just our nature to be hungry.”

And as she walks past the taxi drivers spouting obscenities, and the great frantically twinkling billboards advertising cheap vodka she catches sight of the moon. For the first time, she understands why people used to think it was made out of cheese. In that angle, with that New York light around it, it looks like a great slab of brie. It makes her lick her lips for a moment.

She wants the moon. And because she’s young, and American, and therefore has no other choice, she can only hope that on certain evenings, the moon will want her right back.