the day i ate  whatever i wanted

I began at Dunkin' Donuts. I hadn't gone there since I started Weight Watchers a year ago because I had to lose weight; my doctor made me go. I could have switched doctors, but who needs it with all the forms you have to fill out if you switch. You just wish there were a central headquarters with all your information that you write out once so that everyone who needs anything could tap into it.

Weight Watchers is a good organization, I mean it does actually work if you do the program and they try really hard to make you like you, which, as you may know, is a problem a lot of fat people have, they have low self-esteem. Skinny people look at fat people with disgust and have visions of them stretched out on fuchsia-colored silk sofas snarfing down Cool Ranch Doritos and Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey, but it isn't like that. What it is, is eating and eating with your shoulders hunched and your head down to scratch that itch that won't get scratched, and you have so much shame when you gobble things down you hardly even taste them. You start with I want and you end with I want, only now you have even more weight added to what is already too much and don't think we don't know it all, all, all the time.

But anyway, I went to my Weight Watchers meeting one day, and in addition to the usual annoying emaciated people who have no business there, there were two new members who absolutely blew my mind. Both of them on this same day. One was an old woman on oxygen with a walker taking about a thousand hours to get to the scales, and she was not to my eye fat at all. The other was a blind woman. Here is my question: When that blind woman looks into her mirror, what does she see? And anyway, she, too, had no visible blubber. I mean, I just walked out. I said to myself, No. Today, on account of those two women, on behalf of those two women, I am going to eat anything I want from now until midnight. And I drove right over to Dunkin' Donuts. You may be thinking, Why did she go to Dunkin' Donuts if she could have anything she wanted? Why didn't she go to Cinnabon? Well, because I actually like Dunkin' Donuts way more than Cinnabon. Cinnabon is just a whore, you know, no subtlety. I like almost all the donuts at Dunkin' Donuts and I really like the coffee though I usually just get regular coffee, milk, no sugar. But today I got coffee, heavy cream. "Anything else?" the counter person asked. She was Hispanic, about thirty years old, beautiful long black hair tied back in a ponytail under her Dunkin' Donuts hat and a really big caboose, what can you do, you'd have to be a weird person not to gain a lot of weight if you worked at D.D. Once when I was on a road trip I stopped at this great country kitchen place and every single person who worked there was really fat, I mean really fat. With good skin. And it was a happy place; everybody seemed to get along really well, they were just smiling, holding their little pads and pencils and I had one of those why don't I move here moments, like where I saw myself sitting in a chair by a window in my little yellow house, lilac trees outside and nothing hurting inside. Like, content at last, which I always think I'll be if I move, but which I know is a wrong assumption even though a lot of us have it, just ask any real estate agent. But anyway, the counter woman (her name tag said sigrid, but I think maybe she just borrowed that name tag, it was put on with no care at all, for one thing, just hanging there perpendicularly). Anyway, Sigrid's fat looked good, truly, every now and then you see a person who wears fat well, it is that tight fat and just really looks kind of delicious and also...

 

Berg narrates a varied mix of her short stories about break-free women who face death, aging, diets, and more. There are dark, rich stories, like the one about a man who's been an almost-lover for decades before he gets a brain tumor. These are balanced by the satisfying laugh-out-loud pleasure provided by the title story and its companion, "The Day I Ate Nothing I Even Remotely Wanted," both yummy with details. Surprises and poignant endings make you think, as when an older woman's write-up of an apple pie recipe serves up a slice of memory and advice. As narrator, Berg fills each story with maximum emotion, occasionally giving an accented cameo, for a character from Brooklyn, for example. Her affection for all her characters comes through clearly. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

 

The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted by Elizabeth Berg
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