The Divorce Diet

By Ellen Hawley

“Food and love and loss and resilience . . . are Hawley’s recipe for a slyly entertaining and heartening novel” (Daniel Menaker, author of The Treatment).
 
Abigail is sure the only thing standing between her and happiness is the weight she gained along with her beloved new baby. Until she instantly loses 170 pounds of husband.
 
When Thad declares that “this whole marriage thing” is no longer working (after commenting about how she’s turning into a bit of a pudge), a shell-shocked Abigail takes her infant daughter, Rosie, and moves back to her parents’ house.
 
Thrown for a loop as a suddenly single new mom, she hunts for guidance in her latest weight-loss book, treating its author as her imaginary personal guru. But as Abigail follows the book’s advice, she begins to rediscover her love of cooking. Her diets have pushed her toward fat-free, joy-free foods, and her mother’s kitchen is filled with instant, frozen, and artificially flavored fare. It’s time for Abigail to indulge her own tastes—and write her own recipe for a good life . . .
 
Bitingly funny and wise, with bonus recipes included, this novel is an ode to food and self-discovery for any woman who’s ever walked away from a relationship—or a diet—to find what true satisfaction is all about.
 
“Revenge is sweet. Reinventing yourself . . . is even sweeter.” —Cathy Lamb, author of If You Could See What I See

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kensington Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781617734526

Ellen Hawley

Ellen Hawley has published two previous novels, Open Line (Coffee House Press) and Trip Sheets (Milkweed Editions). Her short fiction and essays have been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Ellen has worked as an editor and copy editor, a talk-show host, a cab driver, a waitress, a janitor, an assembler, a file clerk, and for four fun-filled hours, a receptionist. She has also taught creative writing. Ellen is a native New Yorker who lived in Minnesota for four decades but now resides in Cornwall, UK. For more information about her, please visit ellenhawley.com. or her blog, notesfromtheuk.com

Book preview

Abigail.

DAY

1

Thad’s left for work already and Rosie’s asleep. I know this even before I pry my eyes open. He finally understood that taking care of a baby is exhausting and he let me sleep in. Yay, Thad. I feel whole and rested and strong enough to reach under the bed, fish out Losing Weight the Natural Way, and open to the first chapter:

You are embarking on an exciting and important Life Journey, the book says. By taking control of what you eat, you are taking the first step toward becoming the person you want to be. Before you begin your journey, weigh yourself, unclothed, so that later on you’ll be able to see how far you’ve traveled.

Right. New person. Control. Journey. Today is the first day of whatever. Step one, then: Get myself out of bed.

I toss my nightshirt on the bathroom floor and stand frozen in front of the scale like a furless and hefty squirrel panicked by an oncoming car.

Go on, a voice in my head says. Knowing what you weigh won’t make you one ounce heavier.

It’s the voice of my diet book, like a wise and kind friend who has no problems of her own to distract her from mine.

I step on the scale.

Now open your eyes, my new best friend says. And look down.

I look. And because I have a new friend to support me, I don’t even scream.

Starting weight: 168.5.

It’s okay, my invisible friend says. This is only your starting point.

Yeah, I tell her, but my starting point used to be a hundred and goddamn twenty.

And whose fault is that? she says.

Sorry, I mumble, but she’s already gone.

I toe the scale back into place—Thad won’t care, but even so I don’t want him to know I’ve been weighing myself—and I get dressed. Already my new best friend hates me and has gone out somewhere. Without me. To a no-breakfast meeting, where she doesn’t even want to eat. Where she doesn’t care that I need to talk to her.

To hell with her, then. I invented her anyway.

I open the diet book.

It’s okay, I read. This is only your starting point.

Freaky. Didn’t I just make that up?

Remember, the book says, you’re going to become the person you want to be. Take a minute to think about who that person is.

I take a minute, since Rosie’s not awake yet, but all I can come up with is a memory of Thad yesterday morning, saying I was turning into a bit of a pudge.

Never mind. We’d over-discussed our relationship. We both said things we shouldn’t have. It was my fault as much as his. He didn’t mean it to sound like it did.

And besides, it’s true. Ever since I got pregnant.

See, that’s a beginning.

My invisible friend is back. She’s forgiven me.

Already you know you don’t want to be a pudge.

It took me nine months to put the weight on, I say, so I get nine to take it off. Right?

She doesn’t answer, so I fill in for her.

Sure you do, I say in my chirpiest voice. You’ve used up seven, but that still leaves two luxurious months, so there’s no pressure at all.

I wait for her to say no, we count from today and I get the full nine. When she doesn’t, I take it as a sign that she’s not really inside my head.

I’m relieved.

I’m disappointed. I was enjoying the company.

Where do you disappear to when I want to talk? I ask.

There’s no answer, so I turn to her hardcover self.

Following the Natural Weight Loss Plan takes time and energy at first, she says. Soon it will become second nature, but right now you need to focus on two simple things: Follow the meal plans conscientiously, and keep an honest and accurate log of everything you eat and all the exercise you get.

That’s all. Just those two things.

Fine, then. Meal plan; log. Soon it will all seem natural. The person I want to become is not a pudge. The person I want to become finds it natural to write down everything she eats and does.

I’m not sure I like the person I want to become.

This is not a helpful thought and I put it aside, which is easy to do since Rosie just woke up.

I lift Rosie from the crib, change her, and set her on the kitchen floor to whack at the linoleum with a plastic duck. This gives me a minute to check my meal plan.

Breakfast is one slice of whole wheat toast, one poached egg, and a banana. I’ve never poached an egg in my life, not because I can’t, but because poached eggs are disgusting. Still, if I’m going to follow this diet I want to do it right.

My mother’s ancient Settlement Cook Book says to add salt and a touch of vinegar to the poaching water. I break the egg into a saucer, and when the water boils I slide the egg in. The kitchen smells like Easter eggs.

No, more like Easter eggs with dirty diapers.

You didn’t, I say to Rosie. Not when Mama’s cooking herself the most beautiful poached yuck.

She did, though, and she did it thoroughly, dirtying her diaper, her sleeper, the floor, and the plastic duck, defying the laws of gravity, physics, and probability, all in one shot.

I hold her at arm’s length and rush to the changing table. I rinse the diaper—if there’s one thing I believe in it’s cloth diapers—the sleeper, the hind end, the middle end, and a fair portion of the legs, along with the hands, the wrists, and the duck.

The smell of burnt egg overpowers the smell of diaper and the smoke detector shrieks. I diaper Rosie, wash my hands, turn off the burner, and yank the battery out of the smoke detector.

The house goes very, very quiet.

I wash the kitchen floor while Rosie whacks her plastic duck against the tile.

Even when I’m running a soapy mop across them, I love the tiles Thad and I chose. I love this kitchen, this house, this baby.

I kiss Rosie and scrub my hands.

Calories burned: 27; maybe even 28.

I scrape burnt egg into the trash.

Soon I will become a person who loves poached eggs, but since it will happen naturally, I don’t have to force it. In the meantime, I’m happy to cut myself a slice of bread, grab an old notebook, and write down what I’m about to eat.

Breakfast: coffee, black; 1 slice of dry multigrain toast from a loaf I bought yesterday at this great little neighborhood bakery that doesn’t use preservatives. I believe in bakeries that don’t use preservatives. I believe in neighborhood stores.

Exercise: I promise myself and my new best friend that I will be meticulous about keeping my food and exercise log, but first I slot Rosie into her highchair and hold a spoonful of baby cereal in front of the spot where her mouth was just a second ago.

I say, Mmmm.

I move the spoon to the new spot where her mouth used to be and she moves her mouth to a third spot.

I pretend to eat the spoonful of cereal.

I say, This is so good.

I hold the spoon out.

Rosie turns her head toward the window. I move the spoon. She blows a raspberry. She learned to do this a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I thought it was charming.

Snack: 1 spoonful of baby cereal.

Exercise: I say, Mmmm.

I hold the spoon out. Rosie turns her head toward the doorway.

Snack: remainder of baby cereal.

Exercise: I place the bowl in the sink, turn on the Food Channel, and nurse Rosie.

Calories burned: 780. I admit I’m making up the numbers, but creating milk does burn calories. Why else would cows spend so much time eating?

Okay, that’s a terrible comparison and I hope my invisible friend didn’t hear it, because I don’t want her to think I’m the kind of person who’d say a thing like that.

I spend the rest of the morning cleaning the house, playing with Rosie, reading my diet book, fitting the battery back into the smoke detector, and watching the Food Channel. I love the Food Channel. As much as I believe in being a full-time mother and as much as I love Rosie, I’d have lost my mind by now without it.

I check my diet book to see what I get for lunch.

It tells me to eat a beanadilla. This is one small whole wheat tortilla wrapped around a quarter cup of nonfat refried beans and one ounce of low-fat cheddar cheese, topped with a tablespoon of nonfat sour cream and a washtub of tomato salsa. Plus a half cup of baby carrots. Not adult carrots. You have to catch them before they develop calories.

Why, I ask my new best friend, does the beanadilla have to go in quotation marks? If the name embarrasses you, call it a burrito. Call it a taco. Call it anything that comes from a language spoken by some actual group of human beings living on this planet.

Does my new best friend answer? She does not. She’s not that kind of friend. And I haven’t even gone into the question of how something refried can be nonfat. Do you not-fry it twice? Do you fry more than once in nonfat?

I check my cupboards and refrigerator for the carrots and the ingredients for the—oh, come on, I can’t even think that word. Beanadilla? What kind of person comes up with a name like that?

I don’t have the ingredients. I knew that before I looked, but checking seemed like something I owed my invisible friend.

Make a shopping list, my invisible friend says. Read the week’s food plans and stock up so you won’t be tempted to substitute.

Right, I say. List. Stock up. Substitute.

No, she says. Don’t substitute.

Just wanted to see if you were listening.

She’s not, though. She’s gone again.

I substitute two slices of multigrain for the whole wheat tortilla. I substitute part-skim mozzarella for the low-fat cheese, and two slices of hydroponic tomato for the salsa. For the beans, the carrots, and the nonfat sour cream, I substitute air, and I grill it all in just the tiniest hint of unsalted butter. It makes a lovely little substichilla, and I leave out the quotation marks because they’re fattening.

I sit at the kitchen table with Rosie on my lap.

Lunch: ½ grilled part-skim mozzarella sandwich with sliced tomato on multigrain bread from this great little neighborhood bakery that doesn’t use preservatives.

Exercise: Rosie smacks her arm into my plate, launching it off the table. I grab at the sandwich in midair, breaking it into pieces.

Be sure to eat everything listed in your meal plan, my invisible nag says. Otherwise you’ll get hungry later on and overeat.

Everything, I echo to show her I’ve understood. Overeat.

I set Rosie on the floor and reassemble the sandwich.

Snack: ½ grilled part-skim mozzarella sandwich on multigrain bread with sliced tomato and dust bunnies, which have reemerged from wherever they went to hide while I was washing the floor. Dust rolls are full of fiber and not the least bit fattening. They contain healthy bacteria that will boost my immune system, which is more important now than ever, because I have a baby to take care of and I pass my immunities on to her.

Exercise: I look at Rosie and say, Mmmm.

I make a multiple-personality grocery list, half dictated by the me who’s on a diet and half by the me who’ll cook Thad’s birthday dinner for tonight.

And don’t think of it as a diet, my own private guru says. Diets are temporary. Diets are self-denial. What you’re engaged in is a Life Journey, a profound alteration in your lifestyle. You’ll be losing weight the Natural way. You’ll be—

Got it, I say. Lifestyle. Journey. Starting point. Natural.

She gets huffy at being interrupted, but she leaves me alone to finish my list, which—I can hear this just under her silence—she disapproves of. She wants Thad to Lose Weight the Natural Way too. As far as I can tell she hasn’t seen him—she doesn’t know if he needs to lose weight or gain it—but she doesn’t care. This is a belief system. You don’t have to be fat to commit to it.

What I want, on the other hand, is for Thad to know nothing about my diet. I want to lose weight so naturally that he’ll forget I ever was a pudge. I want him to start running his finger across my shoulders again when he walks past, just because he likes to touch me.

I can’t remember when he last did that.

I buckle Rosie into her car seat and drive to the grocery store. On the way home, I phone a neighbor who also has a baby.

Can I ask a really big favor? I say, steering with one hand so I can hold the phone to my ear, which I shouldn’t do with Rosie in the car, or even without her, but it’s only this once and I’ll be off in a minute and I’m not driving fast.

I explain about Thad’s birthday, the dinner, my diet—Okay, it’s not a diet, it’s a—you know, one of these non-diet things, with, like, stuff I don’t eat and—listen, do you suppose you could watch Rosie for a couple of hours? I should have thought this out ahead of time, but I really want to make him a nice dinner. We need some good time together, and I would be so—

Of course.

Grateful. I’d be so grateful.

I drop Rosie off at the neighbor’s and carry my groceries in. It feels odd not to have Rosie in one arm—kind of lonely and off-balance.

It also feels free. Light. As if I’ve lost weight already. I’ve been planning this dinner all week and want to give it my full attention.

Step one, then: the cake.

In the double boiler, I melt half a pound of bittersweet chocolate imported from Belgium, which I’ve been saving for a special occasion. When the last island of solid chocolate gives itself over helplessly to a liquid state, I stir in unsalted butter, and they wrap around each other like lovers. I would drown in them willingly.

More than willingly: ecstatically.

I pour in crème de cassis. I’ve never used this before, and it’s gorgeous stuff, jewel red and glowing as if it were made of light.

While that cools, I whisk egg yolks and sugar until they’re a pale, sexy yellow, then stir in the chocolate mixture, followed by flour, ground almonds, and salt. When I fold in the egg whites I’ve beaten until they’re stiff, the batter looks like velvet.

Or like sex.

Okay, not exactly like sex, but it does make me think about sex.

Everything makes me think about sex.

Which shouldn’t surprise me, really. It’s been a while.

I set the cake in the oven, melt white chocolate and brush it onto some small, perfect leaves I picked in the backyard, and I balance them in the refrigerator. I melt more chocolate for the frosting, stir in more butter, and watch them wrap around each other like—can’t I think about anything else this afternoon?—lovers. I sweeten it with raspberry jam imported from the shores of a loch somewhere in Scotland and add vanilla, although with the jam I could probably leave it out, then I whip in a bit of cream and imagine painting Thad’s belly with it even though he doesn’t go for that sort of thing.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right way to suggest it.

I cover the frosting and leave it at the back of the stove, where it’s warmest, so it won’t harden while I run across the street to pick up Rosie.

She flaps her arms at me and coos.

I pick her up and say, Are you Mama’s gorgeous baby?

She says, Mmm ba ba ba ba.

And I missed you too.

I thank my neighbor and carry Rosie to my kitchen, where I put a fingerful of frosting on her tongue and one on my own.

Snack: 1 fingerful of chocolate frosting.

Exercise: I say, Mmmm. The frosting tastes of raspberry jam.

Rosie says, Mmmm. True, she follows it with ba ba ba, but she did say it. She has my genes.

Before my guru has time to scold, I swear I’ll take the leftover cake to my neighbor first thing in the morning to thank her for watching Rosie.

My guru keeps her opinion to herself. Or maybe she’s out again and doesn’t notice. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Hurt, I think. Or relieved. Possibly both.

I take the cake out of the oven and put Thad’s potato in, and I set the cake to cool in the refrigerator while I nurse Rosie and wash Rosie and walk Rosie and lower Rosie into her crib. I put clean sheets on the bed, turn down the corner on Thad’s side, and arrange candles in a romantic configuration on the bedside table.

By the time I’m done, I’ve completely seduced myself. How could he not feel the same way?

I check the frosting, which I should have made later, but it’s still spreadable.

My food plan says I should eat Italian chicken. This doesn’t come in quotation marks and is three ounces of boneless, skinless chicken breast marinated in nonfat Italian dressing and fried in nonstick spray oil. It sounds godawful, but I want to do this right. And my guru says it’s natural, so it must be okay.

I open the package of organic, free-range chicken breasts I just bought, and I override all my instincts. In other words, I pull the skin off one and marinate it in chemically enhanced nonfat Italian salad dressing, which I also just bought. It smells like the kind of industrial residue that’s responsible for lowering the reproductive rate of the North American frog, but my Life Journey guru told me to eat it, and it is part of a recipe, so my guru must have cooked it at least once and eaten it and lived to write about it.

That means it tastes better than it smells.

I wonder if eating it kept her from reproducing.

I wonder if I really do want a second child.

I rub Thad’s chicken breast with olive oil, lemon juice, oregano, and basil, and I cover it so the smell of mine won’t contaminate it, then I put them both in the refrigerator while I toast cubes of French bread with—aw, c’mon, it’s only a very little bit—unsalted butter, oregano, and basil. I toss these with romaine lettuce, set them all in the refrigerator, and peel the real leaves out from under the chilled white chocolate, leaving unbelievably professional-looking white chocolate leaves. This is the first time I’ve tried this, but I’ve seen it done on the Food Channel.

I frost the cake and decorate it with the white chocolate leaves and some fresh raspberries.

I’ve never made anything this beautiful before. Except Rosie, of course, who’s sleeping like a basket of drugged kittens, leaving me free to fry Thad’s chicken breast in unsalted butter and mine in nonstick spray oil, which will make me into the person I want to become. Whoever that is.

At seven thirty I light the candles on the dining room table so they’ll be burning when Thad walks in. He’s had to work late a lot recently. It’s no wonder he’s been cranky. Starting today, I will be more understanding.

By eight I’ve blown the candles out so they won’t burn down too far.

When he gets home at nearly eight thirty, I relight them.

Dinner: For me, marinated skinless chicken breast that may or may not weigh 3 ounces; salad with no dressing; slice of cake no bigger across than the width of my thumb because it would be rude to make Thad eat birthday cake by himself, and besides, I don’t want to insult the cook. For Thad, chicken breast with sour cream gravy; baked potato; sort-of Caesar salad with homemade dressing; French bread with unsalted butter; slice of cake.

Exercise: I pick at my chicken breast, which tastes remarkably like industrial residue. My reproductive possibilities are dropping each time I chew and I still haven’t decided about that second child.

By contrast, the bare-naked lettuce tastes great.

Thad looks miserable and picks at his food, and he doesn’t ask if the sour cream came from organic sour cows.

Keeping my voice casual, I ask, Is something wrong?

He shrugs dismally.

Okay, this isn’t the time for casual. I lean forward and say, Thad, tell me. What is it? I sound so understanding that it’s a wonder I have to ask. I would tell me anything.

He mashes cake into the plate with his fork and looks into the mess he’s made. He looks at his napkin, his coffee spoon, his watchband. They’re all easier to look at than I am.

Sweetheart, I say.