she wants the Baby Sleeping Gods, whoever they are and she’s sure they must exist, to know she really appreciates it, to know she really, really does, whenever it is that they make it so that Ivy sleeps. Even if it is mostly during the day.
As she makes her way downstairs, instead of going into their office, where there is darkness in the sunlight that glints so cheerfully across the side of Aubrey’s desk, she heads through the family room and into the kitchen.
She has a new system. She has been putting perfectly sliced squares of part-skim mozzarella cheese into Ziploc baggies. She’s pretty sure the answer is to have everything planned out and baggied up in advance. She pulls a baggie from the red cardboard box, reaching simultaneously into the cabinet where she keeps the Goldfish pretzels. Baggies, baggies everywhere replete with premeasured blocks of proteins and fats and carbs. Brilliant, flawless. Except of course for the part-skim mozzarella cheese. That’s actually a bit complicated because part-skim mozzarella cheese is in fact both a fat block and a protein block. And if you think about things like that too much, it can be quite discouraging, discouraging enough so that you’ll need to devote a fair amount of time (time you might not feel you have) to reading the testimonials peppered throughout the book, all the many success stories—Kathy L., Lori P., Don R. to name but a few—in order to get back on track.
She counts out pretzels and puts them into piles of fourteen. She thinks she’ll sign up for one of those breast cancer walks, or AIDS walks, or MS. The ones where you walk all day, every day, for three days and sleep in tents at night. She’ll bring Ivy with her. As she slides the pretzels into their baggies she thinks how in The Zone by Barry Sears, PhD, there is no mention of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish pretzels. She wonders if they are possibly a trick learned later in Mastering the Zone , or if maybe, unbeknownst to her, Caryn just made it up. She wonders.
She thinks of Kevin Bacon on the train ride back to the suburbs and the way he looked, so exhausted, so tired, so defeated, so different from the way he looked when he looked at the French woman. When he looked at her, he looked so alive. Aubrey doesn’t very often look alive anymore.
When the phone rings a moment later, it’s all she can do not to say, Thank you, out loud, as she picks it up.
“Hello.”
“Look at you answering the phone on the first ring,” Meredith says in a pleasant and jovial tone of voice, especially so for Meredith. And yet it annoys her, which is so unlike Stephanie and especially so unlike her toward Meredith, even though Meres has the propensity to be—especially lately and more and more frequently—somewhere in the general vicinity of annoying.
“Hi, Meres.”
“Okay. So, Steph, I’m just saying, the Zone sucks.”
Stephanie takes a deep, measured breath and lets it out. She does this, she’s pretty sure, as much for Meredith to hear her as for its purported relaxing qualities. “I don’t think the Zone sucks.”
“Okay, how much weight have you lost?”
“Meres, the same as yesterday. I’m only weighing myself once a week. You know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself more than once a week,” Stephanie says, though actually as she says that she wonders, Does Meredith know that? Is that information garnered actually from the book or did she get that from Caryn, too? Or maybe did she just make it up herself? For the life of her right now, she has no idea.
“Okay, so four pounds?” Meredith says. And the way she says it, Stephanie can’t help but notice that she sort of spits out “four pounds,” like it’s nothing. Four pounds , she says, like it’s not a big deal at all, like it isn’t a little bit of a triumph. But it is.
“Yes, four pounds,” Stephanie says. She says the number with pride and tries not to think of what a small number it is when viewed in the context of how
As she makes her way downstairs, instead of going into their office, where there is darkness in the sunlight that glints so cheerfully across the side of Aubrey’s desk, she heads through the family room and into the kitchen.
She has a new system. She has been putting perfectly sliced squares of part-skim mozzarella cheese into Ziploc baggies. She’s pretty sure the answer is to have everything planned out and baggied up in advance. She pulls a baggie from the red cardboard box, reaching simultaneously into the cabinet where she keeps the Goldfish pretzels. Baggies, baggies everywhere replete with premeasured blocks of proteins and fats and carbs. Brilliant, flawless. Except of course for the part-skim mozzarella cheese. That’s actually a bit complicated because part-skim mozzarella cheese is in fact both a fat block and a protein block. And if you think about things like that too much, it can be quite discouraging, discouraging enough so that you’ll need to devote a fair amount of time (time you might not feel you have) to reading the testimonials peppered throughout the book, all the many success stories—Kathy L., Lori P., Don R. to name but a few—in order to get back on track.
She counts out pretzels and puts them into piles of fourteen. She thinks she’ll sign up for one of those breast cancer walks, or AIDS walks, or MS. The ones where you walk all day, every day, for three days and sleep in tents at night. She’ll bring Ivy with her. As she slides the pretzels into their baggies she thinks how in The Zone by Barry Sears, PhD, there is no mention of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish pretzels. She wonders if they are possibly a trick learned later in Mastering the Zone , or if maybe, unbeknownst to her, Caryn just made it up. She wonders.
She thinks of Kevin Bacon on the train ride back to the suburbs and the way he looked, so exhausted, so tired, so defeated, so different from the way he looked when he looked at the French woman. When he looked at her, he looked so alive. Aubrey doesn’t very often look alive anymore.
When the phone rings a moment later, it’s all she can do not to say, Thank you, out loud, as she picks it up.
“Hello.”
“Look at you answering the phone on the first ring,” Meredith says in a pleasant and jovial tone of voice, especially so for Meredith. And yet it annoys her, which is so unlike Stephanie and especially so unlike her toward Meredith, even though Meres has the propensity to be—especially lately and more and more frequently—somewhere in the general vicinity of annoying.
“Hi, Meres.”
“Okay. So, Steph, I’m just saying, the Zone sucks.”
Stephanie takes a deep, measured breath and lets it out. She does this, she’s pretty sure, as much for Meredith to hear her as for its purported relaxing qualities. “I don’t think the Zone sucks.”
“Okay, how much weight have you lost?”
“Meres, the same as yesterday. I’m only weighing myself once a week. You know you’re not supposed to weigh yourself more than once a week,” Stephanie says, though actually as she says that she wonders, Does Meredith know that? Is that information garnered actually from the book or did she get that from Caryn, too? Or maybe did she just make it up herself? For the life of her right now, she has no idea.
“Okay, so four pounds?” Meredith says. And the way she says it, Stephanie can’t help but notice that she sort of spits out “four pounds,” like it’s nothing. Four pounds , she says, like it’s not a big deal at all, like it isn’t a little bit of a triumph. But it is.
“Yes, four pounds,” Stephanie says. She says the number with pride and tries not to think of what a small number it is when viewed in the context of how
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