Heavy Lifting

When I think back on how I started using food as a comfort in all the wrong ways, I remember one dark night near the New York Public Library.

I went up to the newsstand on 42nd Street near Fifth Avenue and bought not one, but two, chocolate bars. I forget what kind. I opened one and ate it, and as I walked away, unwrapped the second and ate that too.

I was having trouble at work, at the big women's magazine at 1515 Broadway. At 26, I had been promoted from editorial assistant to food writer, and froze in my tracks. I started thinking--as I sat at my electric typewriter--that I was writing for millions of women, not just the one or two who really mattered [my editors, who had to like and approve the copy].

"I'm writing for millions of women, I'm writing for millions of women all around America. My cousin in Alaska. My boyfriend J.'s mother in New Jersey." It made it very difficult to get the words out, words that had to be alluring about barbecue, margarita pie, quesadillas, Chinese food, Christmas cookies and microwaved veggies. [This was the 1980s; microwave cooking was new and exciting.]

It was my dream job. I had looked up to Barbara, Carol, Carole and Audrey, who also wrote service copy for the magazine. I was so happy to get the chance, the raise, and the office.

But my editors weren't so thrilled after a while. "You've lost all your wonderful creativity," my editor from Wisconsin blurted out once. "Never in the history of this magazine has a piece of copy been so late," said another, who scared us all when she walked the halls.

Instead of submitting three title and blurb choices on the special blue paper we fed into our typewriters, I would submit maybe 13. H. and I still remember one time at a Mexican restaurant near the office when I was playing with titles for a feature about layered pies. "Luscious layered pies?" "Pie in the sky?" "Mile-high pies?" It went on and on. I must have had 15 or 20 choices I was trying to winnow down.

I once walked into the Xerox room and the food editor hastily picked up what she was Xeroxing and slipped it into a folder. I caught a glimpse: It was one of my title and blurb sheets. It was an awkward and painful moment. She was gathering ammunition with which to fire me, and we both knew it.

And the air was getting thick enough to cut with a knife at the food shows in the dining room, where the cooks set up all the actual meats and cakes and pies and everything else on the highly polished table--so the higher editors could see them before the photo shoot. I felt nervous, ill at ease. It was the beginning of the end.

I now see that with those candy bars, I was trying to swallow, stuff down, silence my intense discomfort. I felt so alone, so scared, so lonely in the face of it all. Too small to stand up to it, to solve it, to figure it out--even though I was 5'9". Was that the beginning of a subconscious effort to make myself physically bigger--even if that bigness was in belly inches, not height?

It may have been the beginning of something akin to a drug addiction. Later, when I bought a sugary marble cruller near the Port Authority on my way to the even better women's magazine I moved onto, I felt as though the lady at the cart was selling cocaine, and I was paying 75 cents for my fix.

One other little thing. My mother worked at the New York Public Library as a part-time page when she was in college at Fordham. She had told me about it. Was I somehow, on some level, looking for her, missing her, when I turned up troubled at the newsstand?

Was there a ghost of a woman watching from inside those library windows who could somehow have helped--or was I just wishing there was?