Stories

It has recently come to our attention that in 90 days my husband may, or may not have a job. As the House Writer, I began immediately to work on resumés, cover letters, and all manner of beguiling a lifetime of hard and varied work into an irresistible nugget of information. No spinning or glossing is necessary in this case; the man has worked hard from the time he was driving a tractor illegally through the fields of the family farm. The work, the hard, complicated part of the thing is distilling the best of him using “action verbs” (as opposed to those other, non-action verbs) and using terms and jargon expected by the business world.

As I write about his work, and think again about the many things he knows, I think about how very odd, incomplete and schizophrenic my own resumé would appear at this time in my life. As of 7:30 or so last night, I might have said something like “well, I gave up law to be a cook, and I’m not trained professionally but I’m really good at it.” Having come directly from putting 25 pounds of flank steak to bed in sealed bags of fragrant marinade, knowing that I would get up this morning and make 100 impossibly fluffy biscuits for strawberry shortcake, I was feeling pretty cocky.

I watched Mark Bittman’s video Pasta With Anchovies and Arugula.

He’s very simpatico and easy to follow and his recipes are usually simple and good. This one is another take on aglio-olio, the iconic Roman dish of spaghetti in garlic and oil.

You can do a lot of things with this dish, adding almost anything you feel like or have around in the fridge, but you have to be careful not to get too creative and ruin what is a classic way to sauce spaghetti. Don’t, for example, throw in that leftover lox from last Sunday’s brunch. That won’t work.

Anyway, I went to the farmer’s market on Saturday – the one across from Lincoln Center – to pick up some farmer-fresh arugula to use in the dish – and every single farmer was sold out of it.arugula It seems everyone on the Upper West Side saw the Mark Bittman video and wanted to make the dish on the same night. Such is the power of the New York Times.

As usual, I'm the salmon swimming upstream as far as weight is concerned. While everyone is vehemently burning calories and lowering carb intake en route to shedding the weight they gained over the holidays, I'm nonchalantly trying to make up for what I lost. Last night, after that apple pie crumble, I lost 8 oz walking back to my car, just yesterday moments after inhaling a scrumptious dish of fettuccine alfredo I lost any calories consumed due to waving my arm to catch a cab, and a few days before that my digestive track tumbled through the french toast crème brûlée I had for brunch, losing a total pound.

These are all exaggerations of course, but I'm theorizing as to how I could have lost ten pounds in a week of little exercise and excess eating. Call it a fast metabolism or a tapeworm, to me fluctuating pounds is as typical as the average Joe getting indigestion after eating a porterhouse steak. A few bites from that same steak and I would spend the day indisposed, my insides deconstructing inside out, eventually leaving me more buoyant than before.

“Do you see this chart, Lynne? This is your height-weight percentile chart.  And do you see where you are? You’re waaaaaay up here. Waaay past the 90th percentile. Do you see that? How would you like a shot to suck all the fat away?”

Ok. So Dr. Salvo didn’t sound quite that evil, but it’s not too far off.  To this day, whenever I hear the word “percentile,” no matter the context, I cringe a little, remembering the good doctor showing me my elevated, childhood status on the red-lined chart.  And why did it have to be red?  As if being a chubby little kid were cause for dire emergency.

He really did ask me if I wanted a shot that would “suck all the fat away.” At the time I remember shuddering and saying no, needle-phobic as most little kids are.  Then, down the road a little bit, in my pubescence, I remember regretting telling him I didn’t want the shot. What if he really did have one? What if I could have saved myself all this pain? All this praying at night that I’d wake up thin?