None of this is important. The only important thing about Cheesy Ramen is how much the fosters loved it. Nothing else Claudia has done in her entire life has brought another human being such pleasure. This is objectively true.
THE FOSTERS KEPT COMING. JACKSON, LEVI, KYLIE, BRIANNA. Cody, Nevaeh, a second Danielle. Those are the names she remembers, though there were others, tiny refugees who stayed for a day or a week while relatives were located, responsible adults of any description willing to take them off the state’s hands.
The fosters were usually White, but not always. In Maine—at the time, and maybe still, the Whitest state in America—this attracted a certain type of attention. When Deb took the kids shopping for school clothes, there were looks and whispers, pointed comments from salesclerks. （“Is that your boy? I guess he looks like his daddy.”） Even as a kid Claudia grasped the subtext: a White woman who’d let herself be impregnated by a Black man was an outlaw. In the spirit of a citizen’s arrest, the salesclerks were putting her mother on notice. I see you. I see what you’ve done.
Claudia hated shopping and still does, and this is possibly why.
But the Maine summers were exquisite, the state parks free and plentiful and gloriously empty a hundred miles from the coast. Her mother’s idea of heaven was to broil herself beside a man-made lake while Claudia towed the fosters around in circles on an inflatable raft. She has vivid memories of those afternoons, but no photos. Deb’s unease around cameras had by then evolved into out-and-out horror, in the years when she was getting big.
She had always been a yo-yo dieter, sugary binges followed by days of atonement （black coffee, cottage cheese, SlimFast, Special K）。 As a child Claudia adapted cheerfully to this regimen. Dieting was a kind of shared project, a thing mother and daughter did together. Each morning, they weighed themselves. They recorded their numbers on a sheet of paper held by magnets to the refrigerator door.
130 LBS.
52 LBS.
After Gary Cain, there were no more diets. Grocery shopping became a weekly celebration, a festive ritual like trick-or-treating. Deb and her children subsisted on family-sized sacks of Fritos and Chips Ahoy!, tubs of Cool Whip straight from the freezer. They ate the way every kid would eat, if no adults existed in the world.
Claudia’s mother got bigger, and finally big, and the therapist in her can’t help making certain connections. After Deb got big, there were no more boyfriends lurking around the trailer. After Deb got big, they were both safe.
At the time Claudia didn’t see this. Like most teenagers, she saw only herself. At fourteen, fifteen, she lived in a constant state of embarrassment, a self-consciousness so intense it was nearly paralyzing, and having a suddenly fat mother （this does not speak well of her） only made it worse. Her mother’s weight gain had coincided with her own puberty, which was traumatic in all the usual ways. （Claudia was a late bloomer—a phrase that should be outlawed—and the blooming process did not fill her with joy.） As she watched her mother expand, her own budding breasts seemed ominous, a harbinger of things to come.
At sixteen she stopped eating. At first it was unconscious: she was so busy shoveling food into the fosters that feeding herself was an afterthought. Later she was more intentional. She discovered that she liked being hungry—the peculiar energy it gave her, the feeling of clarity and control. She could eat what she wanted, when she wanted. Unlike anything else in her life, it was entirely up to her.
She ate what she wanted, when she wanted, which was almost nothing and almost never. When her breasts disappeared and her periods stopped, it felt like victory. She had proved, definitively, that she was not her mother.
She wasn’t, would never be, anything like Deb.
AT COLLEGE SHE MET PEOPLE WHO SUMMERED IN MAINE, IN vacation houses on the coast, but she never met anyone who lived there year-round, and certainly not inland. When the freshman directory—the original facebook, printed on glossy paper and known on campus as “the Pig Book”—listed her hometown, she had no reason to be ashamed. To her classmates at Stirling College, Clayburn had no shabby connotations, no associations of any kind. Raised in East Coast cities and their tony suburbs, they had never been to such a place.