The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [93]
The truth was, I knew it was going to be different now, if I should meet someone whom I might want to date. But I hoped that my strange eating disorder wouldn’t be seen as a handicap. Sure, it would be awkward to have to explain the whole blog premise to anyone who just asked me if I wanted to go grab a bite, and it was bound to cause a little hiccup in those precious few moments when a person first asks someone out. But men who were so uncreative as to not know what to do for a date besides go to a restaurant? I decided I had no need for them. Hey, maybe this could be something of a built-in filtering device, this no-restaurant thing.
I also felt like all of my previous relationships were founded on going to eat in restaurants. This didn’t exactly bring a tear of nostalgia to my eye. In high school, my first boyfriend and I would drive to twenty-four-hour diners throughout New Jersey, which, no matter the town, always had the same Deco exterior and harsh fluorescent lighting. There we’d sit in a booth for hours, sipping coffee and plunking quarters into the jukebox. After he moved away for college, we began going to the big-box, chain restaurants like IHOP, which dotted the highways that then separated us. After a while, it became harder to tell whether we were going to any of these places for the irony or kitsch value as we had been at first.
In college I dated a vegetarian for a little while, and the idea of an exciting restaurant meal then was limited to a large foldout menu filled with fake-meat dishes at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown. It wasn’t bad, but personally I’d rather have gone to the better Chinese restaurant down the street and ordered a spicy and savory tofu dish, maybe garnished with traces of meat for flavor, like ma po tofu.
With Ben, it felt like the first six months of our relationship was a series of checking out one cute, hip new restaurant in Brooklyn after another. This common type of dating wasn’t unenjoyable, of course, and it was definitely a good way of exploring the city. But after a while you might begin to wonder if there was any reason the two of you had decided to spend time together other than to try the next thing on the menu, or the next hot restaurant.
I was determined to find alternatives to the stale old ritual of going out to eat on dates. Dating while not eating out in New York was just the challenge I needed to try my hand at next, to make the experiment more complete. Now, who else was up for the challenge?
Around this time in late February and early March, I also found out that Ben had moved on to another relationship. I discovered this by accident; while clicking around on MySpace one day at the office, I saw that the relationship status on Ben’s profile had gone from “single” to “in a relationship.”
My hands froze as I stared at the screen, and I felt a nasty surge of nausea rise in my throat. I knew at that moment whom it was with: that coworker of his, who had become so chummy in the last few weeks of our living together. The three of us had even hung out together several times. There was no doubt in my mind that she, who incidentally was ten years my senior, was the person he was now proudly in a relationship with.
I spun around in my seat. The queasy feeling in my stomach persisted as I stared for a moment straight ahead into space. That space was actually the back of my coworker Keith’s cubicle, and his computer monitor was right then tuned to Facebook. I got up and went to the ladies’ room, half expecting to retch into the toilet. But nothing came.
“I feel like I’ve been shat on by a million birds,” I told Matt that evening. We were standing in my kitchen, getting ready to make an easy dinner and crack open a bottle of white wine that was sweating on the counter. I’d invited a few friends over for a simple dinner a couple of days before, but everyone else had fallen ill or, in Karol’s case, had literally fallen, while jogging, and was nursing a bruised knee.
“And this woman