The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [134]
“Well. I don’t know,” my mom said. “Maybe you can take a break. You can’t?”
“No, no breaks. What? Of course not,” I said.
“Oh. Okay,” she said glumly.
“What movie are you seeing?” I changed the subject.
“Well, just think about it. I’m meeting him at twelve thirty. Just come along,” she said.
“But I already brought my lunch—,” I began to say, right before my mom got another call and quickly got off the line.
Shaking my head, I turned back to my product copy.
It was August. The next month, I would hit the two-year anniversary of my blog and of not eating out. I had no idea how to celebrate this milestone. Many of my friends had been asking me lately if I would keep on not eating out, like I had proudly said a year before. I never liked the thought of scrapping my strict diet on an exact date, though. I thought it might end more gradually somehow, or else spontaneously, with an earth-shattering circumstance, or an epiphany. I guess I just didn’t want to know in advance or think about how I would end it.
But two years was a long time. Long enough that I had adapted to the daily demands of not eating out without thinking of them as extra work, or unusual in any way. Hey, people didn’t eat out many centuries ago, and even though my days were busy, for a New Yorker at least, when push came to shove, I’d become pretty agile at feeding myself without the help of restaurant workers. Today, for instance, I’d brought an oatmeal bar that I’d made two days earlier, with some dried cherries that I’d bought for a salad a few weeks back. Along with the zucchini pasta for lunch, I’d provided myself with a roasted beet, wrapped in foil, for afternoon snack cravings I knew I would have. Then, as an extra guard, I’d brought a couple of unpeeled carrots, fresh from the Greenmarket. The way I was living now, making dinners for myself at home on most nights, eating the leftovers for lunch, and cobbling together snacks from this and that in my fridge, was so routine that I knew I could keep at it indefinitely. It truly could go on forever.
My mom of course knew better than to suggest lunch in a restaurant in the city, something that I would so routinely object to. Maybe you can take a break, she had said. As I continued to work throughout the morning, my mind was spinning with a dizzying storm of rationales for either going to meet my mom and uncle for lunch or not. I could ... meet up with them at the restaurant, sit and talk, but not eat? I had done this before with friends, and it was not fun. I could bring my lunch out to a park and suggest they get takeout and sit at an outdoor table with me instead? Too much trouble for my relatives, I concluded. Plus, they would hate being outside on a hot day like this. Or I could, as usual, just not meet them at all.
I sighed loudly. I remembered the first day I began to work at my current job, my two bosses had taken me out to lunch. It was something they did for all new employees, an icebreaker, a kind gesture, and I appreciated the offer. I couldn’t say no. The lunch was hardly comfortable, though. We’d gone to an Italian restaurant around the block, a popular business lunch spot, it seemed. I had a salad with a huge mound of greasy, undercooked, and underseasoned salmon on it, and I’d pecked hopelessly at the leaves of baby spinach underneath it while trying to make simple conversation. That had been my last midtown Manhattan restaurant experience, and it didn’t make me hungry for more. Why, then, was I so naggingly tempted to meet up with Mom and Jo-Jo for lunch today? It struck me then as somewhat unfair; I had eaten out with my bosses but wouldn’t make an exception