The Breakaway(110)

“But that’s what…” That’s what you told me. Except had Eileen ever said those words? Or had she simply sent Abby to a summer camp where the management believed them to be true?

Abby thought of every tasteless, joyless meal her mother had ever served; the years of every plate being half filled with vegetables, the grilled chicken breasts and sweet potatoes with the merest gloss of butter. She thought of how there were never cookies that weren’t SnackWells in her mother’s pantry, how there was only ice milk, never ice cream in her freezer, and how any cake—apple cake for break-the-fast at Yom Kippur, yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting for Abby’s birthday—would disappear the day after it had been served, even when there should have been plenty left over. “Gone,” Eileen would say when Abby would work up the nerve to ask about it, and Abby knew better than to make further inquiry. She just understood that the cake had been disappeared, and that she was wrong, and weak, for asking, for wanting more.

“It worked for you, didn’t it?” Abby asked.

Eileen rubbed her fingertips against her forehead, then lower, to smooth her eyebrows. “No,” she said. “It didn’t.”

Abby stared at her mother’s sinewy arms, her short, highlighted hair and flat chest. The last tomato, split in two, dripping on the cutting board. The knife beside it. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I had gastric bypass surgery, after the three of you were born.” And if Abby had been surprised to learn that, once upon a time, Eileen had been fat, she was now shocked, almost to the point of speechlessness.

“When?” she asked, her voice rusty.

“When you were three, and Simon was five, and Marni was seven.” She picked up the knife, then set it down. “Your father was dead set against it. Back then, it was much newer, and a lot riskier. ‘There are side effects,’ he told me. ‘You could die.’ But I’d gained weight with each baby, and I hadn’t been able to lose it, and my doctors were starting to say all the things doctors say, about being prediabetic, about how the weight wasn’t good for my joints and heart. They’d lecture me about my weight, even if I was there for an ear infection.” Her face had changed again; her expression now rueful and angry. “I remember once I had a stomach bug. I couldn’t eat for a week. I was throwing up constantly. And when I finally got sick enough to go see a doctor—which I hated doing, because, no matter what I was there for, I always got the same lecture…”

“… they congratulated you.” Abby’s face felt numb. Eileen nodded.

“My doctor told me to keep doing whatever I was doing. Which was puking nonstop.”

“I hope you got another doctor,” Abby said.

Her mother smiled sadly. “I got the surgery. I told your father that I wanted to be healthy, so I could be around for you, and him, a long, long time.”

“Not healthy. Smaller,” said Abby, her voice sharp. “You wanted to be smaller.”

“Smaller. Okay. Fine.” Eileen raised her hands in surrender. “You’re right.”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you weren’t the one with the problem?” Abby asked. She could hear how loud her voice was, how angry she sounded. “That maybe it was the world’s problem, not yours?”

Eileen’s head drooped. “I wasn’t going to change the world,” she said. “Maybe I should have tried. Probably that would have been the better thing to do. The braver thing.” She sniffled, and Abby tried to harden her heart, to hang on to her rage, lest she end up feeling sorry for Eileen. “But I’ve never been very brave.” Eileen looked up. Her eyes were teary as she met her daughter’s gaze. “I’m not like you.”

Abby swallowed hard. She knew how to handle a disappointed Eileen, a judgmental Eileen, an Eileen who was angry or frustrated or bitter or resigned. She did not, she realized, have the first idea what to do with an Eileen who was sorry, an Eileen who was actually apologizing, admitting to her mistakes and telling Abby that Abby was the brave one. A formerly fat Eileen. An Eileen who’d once been like her.

Abby licked her lips. “Did Dad end up being okay with you getting the surgery?”

“Oh, he was terrified.” Eileen’s lips curved in a small, private smile. “I wore him down. I told him there were side effects to being overweight.” She shook her head. “I told him it was my body and my choice. And, eventually, he gave in.”

Abby put her hands on the counter, trying to ground herself. She could smell the warm bagels and her mother’s perfume; could feel the cool air of the kitchen, could hear, faintly, her stepfather, upstairs on the phone. Gary the Businessman didn’t take even the High Holidays off.

Speaking slowly, Abby said, “So my whole life, you’ve let me think that you’re a naturally thin person, and that if I just ate like you, I’d be thin like you. And, meanwhile, your stomach’s the size of a tennis ball.” That bubble of anger was swelling, supplanting her sympathy and sadness. “Why didn’t you tell me? Do you have any idea how it felt, growing up fat with a mother who looked like you?”

Eileen addressed the counter, not meeting Abby’s eyes. “I didn’t tell you because I thought if I was careful when you were little, if I made sure you never gained weight in the first place, then you wouldn’t end up…”