After almost six years on the job, I’d met Dave. He had graduated summa from Rutgers and started his career at a small paper in a New York City suburb in New Jersey, where he’d covered five local school districts. After his second year there, he’d exposed how a school superintendent and the head of the school board were colluding to raise the superintendent’s salary. By his third year, he’d won a statewide prize for his stories about how the Democratic Party was paying homeless men and women to fill out absentee ballots. Then, at the Examiner, I’d been tapped to design graphics for his series about the mayor’s race, fitting together the text elements with pictures and, online, with video.
“Hey, thanks,” he’d said, bending over in front of my oversized screen as I’d shown him my first draft. “That’s really great.” Unlike most of the other, dressed-down reporters, he wore a crisp, ironed shirt and a tie. He smelled good, when I was close enough to notice, and I’d already appreciated his slender-hipped, broad-shouldered body and imagined myself folded against the solidity of his chest. He’d smiled at me—white teeth, beard-shadowed cheeks. “Can I buy you a snack item?” He’d walked me out into the hall to the vending machine, where I’d selected a bag of pretzels and he’d bought himself a bottled water, and we sat in the empty stairwell, exchanging first names, then work histories. The conversation flowed naturally into an invitation to meet at a bar the next night. Drinks became dinner at Percy Street Barbecue, where we sat over plates of ribs and Mason jars of spiked lemonade, talking about our parents, our schools, which bones we’d broken (his leg, my wrist), and our shared love of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon. We’d both been startled when our waiter had cruised by our table to announce that it was last call. We’d talked from six o’clock that night until two in the morning.
Within a week, we were a couple. I imagined he’d only get more successful as time went by. Neither of us believed that newspapers were going anywhere or that, eventually, my funny, dashed-off blog posts would be more valuable than his ability to wrest a great (or damning) quote out of a politician or a criminal, to write fast on deadline, to think of witty headlines and slyly funny photo captions, or to bide his time for months, filing Freedom of Information Act requests, gathering documents, hunting down sources, doing the kind of reporting the Examiner ended up not being able to afford anymore. He would be the breadwinner, I would be the homemaker . . . only now, as I looked at him, with his eyes the same shade as Ellie’s and the circles that had been underneath them since her birth, I marveled at how everything had changed, and wondered if our marriage could survive it.
• • •
“Ma’am?” I blinked. The waitress stared down at me, pen and pad in hand. Somehow, my wineglass was empty. I’d had an oyster—Dan had ordered two dozen of them—and a single slice of bread, but nothing else.
“Oh . . . um . . .” I fumbled for my menu, doing the quickstep between what I wanted (scalloped potatoes and slow-roasted pork shoulder) and what I should allow myself (steamed asparagus, grilled salmon). I settled on the stuffed pork chop.
“Very good,” she said, and vanished. I turned back to Janet, who was gossiping with Dave and Barry about whether the pretty twenty-four-year-old pre-K teacher with the tattoos we could sometimes glimpse under the sleeves of her vintage blouses had actually worn nipple rings to Parents’ Night.
The food arrived. I used my heavy steak knife to slice into the glistening meat. A puddle of juice pooled underneath the pork chop. I squeezed my eyes shut and made myself nibble a tiny sliver.
“Not hungry?” Janet asked. She’d ordered the pork shoulder dish with a lot of garlic—per its name, Cochon was heavy on the pig—and the smell was making me queasy.
“I think I already drank my calories,” I said. The truth was, I hadn’t been hungry much lately, a strange situation for a girl who’d always loved her food. Nothing looked good, and the effort of purchasing groceries, preparing a meal, setting the table, and washing the dishes seemed monumental. I’d heat up organic chicken nuggets for Eloise and keep the freezer stocked with Trader Joe’s heat-and-eat meals that Dave could prepare on the nights I was stuck at my computer, writing or editing or interacting with Ladiesroom’s readers. For myself, I’d grab a yogurt or a bowl of cereal. The irony of the Internet comments was that I was thinner now than I’d been in years, but I didn’t look good, and I knew it. My complexion had taken on a grayish undertone; my flesh—even if there wasn’t as much as usual—seemed to sag and hang.