Eat Only When You're Hungry Read online

  Deb was standing now. “When you’re ready,” she said. GJ had gone through a phase of mimicking her mannered ways. Napkin in lap. Elbows poised, just off the table. Saying Many thanks instead of Thank you. Then he had entered a phase of despising her every move, as if her way of living, her clean, ordered, thoughtful way of living, was in direct insult to his. There were moments when Greg felt the same way. When you’re ready. Like he was one of her clients during tax season. But then she reached out, ran a fingertip across his cheek, cold and soft as a paintbrush. He hadn’t known he was crying, despite himself, until then. He felt foolish, judged by the air he was breathing. Simpering old man. Ottoman rigid with embarrassment for him. “I’m ready,” he said.

  The RV seemed made for men like him, men whose asses needed room to spread, men whose backs zinged at the sight of a golf club. The driver’s seat was as wide as two seats in the Volvo, skinned in a plush gray something or other, and felt four feet deep with cushion. The headrest stayed out of his way but was at the ready whenever Greg needed cradling. He imagined having this seat removed and installed in his living room, bolted to the floor, in front of but not too close to the TV.

  The vehicle smelled like someone had smoked a pack of cigarettes while spritzing a whole canister of air freshener, a comforting smell actually, something very akin to the bathroom at Mick’s Bar & Grille, where he used to take clients and Deb and GJ. On occasion he’d go by himself, sitting at the bar yelling orders for beers and fries over John Cougar Mellencamp and Bob Seger and pretending not to notice himself in the mirror behind the whiskey, though he found it hard to tear his eyes away. He looked like pictures of himself as a boy, as a young man, as a middle-aged man in the family pictures Deb insisted on, but he still couldn’t get a handle on what he looked like. Even now, in the RV’s rearview, he could see slices of his face—forehead, nose and cheeks, mouth and chin—but never everything at once. He had read a Reader’s Digest article about face blindness in a doctor’s waiting room, but had been called in before he could finish it. He never found out if people could have face blindness for themselves. He supposed he could google it. It’s what Deb would do. Sometimes it was nice to have easily solved problems remain unsolved, for those days when it all felt like a mystery. He had more and more of those lately, but Google didn’t have an answer for everything.

  He and Deb had hugged goodbye outside the open door of the RV, a long, full-contact hug that Deb had ended using her normal signal: a flutter of pats between his shoulder blades. He’d attempted to pat her as well, but his hand was in a fist over the RV keys, and he ended up pounding her a little.

  “You call me,” Deb said, pointing at his pocket, where he kept his phone, a black square that flipped open. “Keep it charged.”

  She had waved as she was getting into the Volvo, then called out, “I’ll be fine!” She hadn’t turned to wave as she drove away. She would be fine. She always was. He imagined that’s what she’d say when he was on his deathbed. He didn’t know where these unkind thoughts came from; she didn’t deserve them, but I’ll be fine was a strange thing to say at that moment, there was no doubt about that. The last time they’d discussed GJ’s disappearance, Greg wanting to go over every possibility (except for death), it had ground to a silent halt, both of them spent, sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Suddenly Deb spoke: “A man in my swim class, Reggie, I think his name is, said I have nice legs for a woman of my maturity. My maturity. Isn’t that funny?” She wanted him to think it was a story about how the man had pronounced the word: ma-tour-a-tee. But Greg knew better. It was not a warning, it was a fact. Deb could find what she needed anywhere. She was nothing if not resourceful. Instead of scaring him, it made him feel calm, more at peace.

  He had eased the RV out of its parking space, maneuvered it around the tricky curve in the lot and out onto the main road, all in time to see the Volvo pulling a U-turn at the light and going back toward home. Ships in the night. Vehicles in the evening. The RV was too high up for him to be able to see her face, to notice anything other than her arm, the neat white cuff of her shirt unfurling, blooming like a hidden Kleenex. When he reached the light it was red. The RV needed a few pumps of the brake to fully stop. At each corner, facing each other like warriors painted in lurid yellows and reds, there was a Popeye’s, an Arby’s, a Bob Evans, an AutoZone. He remembered that he’d forgotten his lunch. He remembered that he’d forgotten. Ha! That should be on his tombstone.

  Up ahead was the turnoff for the highway that would take him slightly west and then south. A few miles past that was the highway that would take him north. He took the first one, because it connected to the second one a hundred miles down, long enough for him to know for sure if he wanted to change his mind. If he didn’t, he’d reach GJ’s mother’s condo after about ten hours. He hadn’t called ahead. They had called each other, texted, both asking if the other had heard from GJ. But she didn’t seem as concerned as she might have been. She didn’t know where he was, wasn’t interested in joining Greg in the speculation. It felt like something was off, like she wasn’t telling him the whole story. Or maybe that’s what he hoped was true. So he didn’t plan on calling ahead. Some people were better caught off guard.

  Greg had been born in Virginia, grown up in Denver, met GJ’s mother at college in Arizona, settled their uneasy family in Florida, and then fled with Deb, following job opportunities to Greensboro and then Birmingham, before finally retiring, almost on a whim, to the mountains of West Virginia. GJ’s mother had stayed in Florida, which was as hot as Arizona but somehow worse, and Greg had come to think of their time together as a journey between two poles in hell: one dry and one humid.

  GJ’s mother. Marie. A common name, and now any time he met a Marie he assumed the placid, friendly face on the woman was a mask for the dangerous rapids of emotion underneath. He first saw her at a party, laughing among a group of guys, holding a cup of punch like everyone else but never, ever drinking from it. It was why he noticed her in the first place: she’d gone to fill up her cup but had ladled the punch back into the bowl, a clever trick that kept her sober as a church all night long. Greg got so drunk that night that he fell asleep outside his own dorm room, drooling onto the stiff carpet and waking only when his roommate opened the door, found him, and tried dragging him inside. He saw Marie at the library weeks later, and it brought the night back to him, how she’d seemed to be enjoying herself without drinking, how for him blacking out had been the point. Only the night before seeing her at the library, Greg had allowed a nerdy guy in a raincoat to place a tiny paper stamp under his tongue, had let it dissolve while watching the guy’s enormous Adam’s apple moving up and down his thin neck like he was trying to dislodge it. “There we go,” the guy said, and Greg thought he meant he had succeeded in swallowing it down, his neck finally smooth and knobless, finally.

  She was leaned back in a chair, reading the newspaper the way his father always had, opened in front of her face like a display of normalcy in a forgotten museum.

  “Hey,” he said. And when she didn’t immediately respond, he said, “Anything good?”

  She bent a corner, looked up at him. Her eyes were black, like they were all pupil, all-seeing. Something he hadn’t noticed the night of the party. She was wearing glasses, big as windowpanes. “Do you mean me?” she asked.

  For a moment he wondered if he did mean her. Was he remembering this woman correctly? “I think I saw you,” he said, which was the absolute truth. “At a party at Dov’s apartment a few weeks ago?”

  She folded the paper down, putting it to rest on her lap, smoothing it like a piece of laundry. “Are you the guy I borrowed cab fare from?” she asked. “You don’t look like him. That guy was blond.”

  Later Greg would remember how they were both trying to place each other, how they both couldn’t quite be sure who they were recognizing, and bitterly think to himself, I should have known.

  “That wasn’t me, no. I was the guy who…” But he didn’t know w
ho he’d been that night. I was the guy who was partying. I was the guy who got so drunk he became faceless. I was any guy on any night. “I was the guy who mixed the punch.” This was true; he had mixed it one or two times. To mix was to add more alcohol.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “Do you want to sit down? Or are you waiting for the paper?” She held it out to him.

  He wanted to tell her he’d been fascinated by her, laughing like one of the guys, fooling everyone with her punch trick. He wanted to ask her why she did it. Why come to a party and not drink? He couldn’t imagine anything worse than hanging out with a bunch of drunk people if you yourself weren’t drunk. It had been what college was to him: a place to let go, let go completely. To reach a place beyond inhibition, beyond thought. His mother’s voice: Don’t embarrass us. A throwaway thing she said often. Now he was somewhere she couldn’t even see him. It felt like a hidden fortune he couldn’t spend fast enough.

  “I already read it,” he said. “But I’d like to take you to dinner, or coffee, or to a movie sometime?”

  “How about all three?” she said, smiling, laughing at him even. “How do you know I don’t have a boyfriend?”

  He looked around him, suddenly worried she did have a boyfriend who was watching all of this happen, watching him make a fool of himself in front of a strange girl whom he couldn’t stop staring at. His jaw felt tired; he’d been clenching it all night long, working through the high, and his mouth felt sour, unclean. He’d showered and brushed his teeth, come to the library to study, but in front of her now he felt like a homeless man hoping to pass as a lawyer.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she finally said. “And coffee makes me crazy. But we could go for lunch now, if you want.”

  He did the math quickly in his head. He had a few quarters in his pocket, a couple dollars shoved into his economics textbook at home, hidden from his roommate. In the three seconds before he’d asked her out he’d figured he’d have time to go home and get his money, to make more in fact—he was days away from being paid for the job he had cleaning classrooms in the math buildings on campus.

  “I have a sandwich in my bag,” Marie said. “We could each eat a half. Plus an apple.” She seemed to read his mind. Over time Greg would learn that Marie was a master at watching people think, intuiting their every whim. It was a talent that during their years together held him fascinated, afraid, and, finally, disgusted.

  He didn’t know if he should sit, wait for her to pass him his half, or suggest going outside, finding a shady tree, somewhere soft to sit. Marie put the paper on the chair next to her, stood, and hefted her schoolbag over her shoulder. That answered that. All his life, Greg appreciated people who just made the decision for him. He and Marie ended up on the library steps, because it was Arizona and even a shady tree couldn’t shield them from the sun pushing its heat down on them, that ceiling of oven. And at least the library’s porch had fans, lazily wheeling above them, offering a slice of air about every three minutes. Greg could feel his body slowly becoming a liquid, melting in front of this girl, his sweat probably smelling of beer.

  “My dad didn’t want me to come here,” she was saying.

  “Come to Arizona?” Greg asked. The sandwich was egg salad with little bits of pickle and olive. It had been sitting in her bag long enough to become enfolded in its own scent, warm and a bit too moist.

  She laughed, revealing a fleck of black pepper clinging to her incisor. “No, I mean come to college.” She ran her tongue over her teeth. He wondered if he’d been staring at the fleck, if that’s how she knew, or if it was one of those things people did just to be sure. Just to be sure, he ran his tongue over his teeth, too. “He thought I should stay home and help around the house.”

  “Ah,” Greg said, which was what he said when he wanted to acknowledge what was said without going too far. He wanted to say that sounded like an old-fashioned, selfish thing for a father to say to a child, but his roommate had once said something similar about Greg’s parents and Greg had wanted to set his cot on fire with the lighter they hid in the pencil cup.

  “Sometimes I feel bad about it,” she said. She laughed again; the pepper fleck was still there, holding strong. He waited for her to run her tongue along her teeth again, but she didn’t. She took her glasses off instead, reached over and tugged his T-shirt sleeve a bit until she had enough cloth, and used it to clean her glasses. Greg had grown up in a house where you hugged only on birthdays or solemn occasions, where when friends came over they had to ask for a glass of water or juice. He had friends whose mothers expected you to saunter into the kitchen and make yourself a snack, who hugged him and didn’t tell him to take off his shoes or ask him when he was going to grow up. He had always felt alarmed by this kind of closeness, on guard. The kind of relaxation, the comfort in his own body that they expected of him was bizarre. Eventually he decided to go to the fridge every single time, even if he wasn’t thirsty or hungry, simply to trick them into believing he could be that kind of person. Hello, I am simply a human like you are a human. I did not count the steps it takes to get from the back door to the kitchen, and I definitely feel one hundred and ten percent normal taking your last Fanta. Marie clearly grew up in that kind of house, or at least a house where you took people’s comfort for granted. Where you could meet someone and then twenty minutes later be using his T-shirt to clean your fingerprints and cheek smudges and dust off of your glasses. It felt beyond intimate to Greg. He would have been less shocked if she had reached over and cradled his penis in her hand. But there was the other feeling, too, the feeling he got when his friends’ mothers said things like Now, Greg, you’re staying for supper, right? or I remembered that you like these kinds of potato chips the best or How did that test go? Most of him was on guard, calculating his responses. But a small part of him was touched, genuinely touched, his throat closing a little and his face wanting to crumple. What was that? They accepted him. He was one of them. He wouldn’t be alone forever. His mother, ashing into a tea saucer. Nobody loves you like your mother. Something like that.

  Marie had accepted him. She could clean her glasses on his sleeve and tell him about the selfish things her father said to her. He was a shield, a fort of blankets in which she could confide her every thought. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. He was thinking of his mother, of her twiglike wrists and small face. There were seventeen steps from the sidewalk up to the library. From the top of the steps to the front door was between ten and twelve steps, depending. Don’t feel bad. It’s what he told himself often.

  “I do and I don’t,” Marie said. “Like this one time, I was helping my dad sort his papers. He sells magazine subscriptions, sometimes. I was sorting the subscribed from the unsubscribed. And I was thinking, ‘Well, I could do this. This isn’t all that painful. And maybe one day I could get promoted to partner in his little business, or something. And I could still be me.’ Isn’t that strange? ‘I could still be me.’ So clearly, if you have to convince yourself that you could still be you by doing something you had previously dreaded or rejected, then maybe that is actually not the best life choice.” Marie said things like life choice. Realized. Fully realized. She spoke in self-help speak but did not read those kinds of books or travel in those kinds of circles. She just was that kind of person, the kind to consider herself, to self-scrutinize. To look at life like it was a one-million-piece puzzle. Like there was a chance at solving it.

  “So I feel bad because I couldn’t accept what I was saying to myself, but I don’t feel bad because I think my father would like me even less if I didn’t defy him. I really think that sometimes.” She threw the remaining third of her sandwich-half like a Frisbee. We watched a squirrel approach it, edging up like a guy at a party trying to see if there was anything there. The sun was beginning to set, drawing up its stinging cloak, though in some ways the night’s heat was even worse, because it all felt closer. Inescapable.

  “I don’t think my mother ever liked me,” Gre
g said, surprising himself. He didn’t want the afternoon to end, maybe. Or he felt dared to trade a truth for a truth.

  “Doesn’t everyone feel that way?”

  “Oh. Do they?” Greg thought of his friends’ mothers again. His friends never seemed to feel that strongly about them one way or the other. They simply were. They appeared when they were needed and they disappeared back into their own days when they weren’t. One asked him to call her Mona. Another said he could call her Mrs. Helen. “Do you think your mother never liked you?”

  “My mother is a very depressed person,” she said, as if this answered the question. “I bet your mother is a very depressed person, too. I think our mothers’ generation is a very depressed generation.” She said it as if it were a known fact, something throwaway, as bland as Christopher Columbus discovered America.

  His mother never slept in. In fact, he sometimes wondered if she slept at all. She always had her makeup on, was always dressed neatly in bright colors. She smoked all day and drank starting at 5:00 on the dot. She had her friend come over to set her hair twice a week. She didn’t look like what he imagined a depressed person looked like: greasy, half-asleep, hateful. His mother laughed often. She threw dinner parties and went to the club for drinks. She kissed Greg’s father full on the lips every morning and every night when he came home. It was more that she treated Greg like a guest who had long overstayed his welcome. But maybe he was overreacting. Maybe every child wondered if he or she was the sole source of regret in their parents’ lives. He had once asked his mother what was for dinner. Go out and pick yourself up a mommy and ask her. To be fair, she was two gins in when he’d asked.