I am sitting on a couch at my favorite cafe, staring at the feet of the woman I love. Emma. She sits across a table and a few steps away, on a stool, at the bar. She is smoking, so she is exiled to the bar. She's kicked off her sandals and is absentmindedly rubbing the soles of her feet against a cool aluminum brace that adds support to the legs of the stool. Emma reads the paper as she smokes. She gives me an occasional glance, a smile, sometimes a seductive wink. But I am transfixed by her feet. It's not a fetish, although her feet are quite lovely. Emma's feet, hands, her wrists are so delicate. Her fingers have not softened, like her mouth and her jaw line, with her recent weight gain. Emma is newly fat; re-fat would be more accurate. Emma was a fat kid who had lost weight in high school because of the relentless teasing of her friends and the constant badgering of her family. I stare at Emma's feet and I am transported into a scene that I have never witnessed... It is 20 years earlier, in Philadelphia; Emma is 9. She is running barefoot across a thick shag carpet, about to execute a perfect cartwheel. She's a tireless experimenter, and intrepid explorer, a voracious reader. She is hungry for life. She is always hungry and she refuses to deny herself any experience, any taste.

Until she was in 9th grade. That was when she grew tired of being the fat friend. She had then and has now an incredibly beautiful face. Her dark hair falls in ringlets around full cheeks, making her intense eyes look even more intense. But in 9th grade, her grace and charm, her intelligence and compassion was not enough. She had to be thinner. Actually, she had to be thin. So for the next 10 years, from high school to college, she would live a more cautious life. She focused her attention on meals. She would eat breakfast but not lunch; have a salad but not dessert If she ate a piece of cake, she wouldn't enjoy it. Instead, she would calculate her next day's calorie count, trying to figure out which meal she would skip later. Her waistline, her hips, her bust grew smaller. And because she spent so much time, energy and focus on what she ate and less on her passion to take in the world, her life grew smaller, too. Food, which had become a just part of her life, now dominated her life. When she graduated high school she went off to Cornell and majored in nutrition. She never did find romance or happiness or popularity when she was thin. Men, she told me later, found her attractive but distracted. Her friends at school were competitive, sometimes combative. And that she was able to diet herself into a size six and could make a v-neck T-shirt look like something Donna Karan would have spent a season perfecting did not win her any points with her wider circle of friends at school, each of whom had their own battle trying to contain the effect of the long Ithaca winters on their bodies. Emma weighs nearly 80 pounds more than she did in college and she still makes a v-neck T-shirt look like something that Donna Karan had cooked up. Don't take my word for it. Everyone says so. She's a dish.

She is also engaging, patient, aware, challenging, fun, and dangerously sexy. But it's her patience and amazing ability to size up a situation that captures my heart today.

We are sitting in our cafe, I am on a couch, Emma is on a stool near the bar; two women walk in with babies all over the place. Each pushes one of those two-seater strollers; one is holding a 4-year old by the hand. Two moms, 5 kids. Lot's of noise. The kids and strollers and bottles of liquid stuff get arranged on and around the table next to me. The 4-year old, whose name is Chloe, jumps into the seat with a big thud. She turns her head to me; she is all smiles and light. "I'm Chloe, hello!" she yells. She tells me she is four. That's how I know. She also tells me, the guy next to me, Emma, and anyone who will listen that she wants a chocolate chubby. This takes me a minute, but soon I learn that a chocolate chubby is a big yellow cupcake, smothered in thick chocolate icing. Her mom, I notice, is standing at the counter, looking through the glass at the pastry, sandwiches and bagels. She probably has no idea that she's doing it, but she is squeezing the back of her right thigh, just below her tush. It's like she's testing something, trying to figure out what she could eat by the pliancy of her flesh. I look up at Emma. When I look back, Chloe's mom is walking away from the counter and toward Chloe and me, chocolate chubby and bagels on a tray. Chloe digs in. No fork. She is covered with icing and I am called back, this time to my own childhood. Every afternoon after kindergarten and first grade, my best friend and my heartthrob Wendy would crowd with our other friends for 7-layer cake and milk. I was a weird kid, my mom tells me. I would cut off the icing and eat the cake, saving the sweet stuff for later. Deferred gratification. Chloe would have none of that. She is going for the gusto and her mom is a little concerned. "Chloe, stop that now," her mom says in a serious tone that shatters the moment. "If you keep that up, Chloe," she warns, "you're going to become a real fatso." I look hard at Chloe's mom, and when that doesn't seem to have any affect, I look at her mom's friend, hoping that some message will get transmitted by association. I cannot believe the seed that I just watched get planted in that sweet little girl, and I wondered just how long the plow had been at work.

Emma does better. She slides back into her sandals, slides off the stool and puts out her cigarette. She walks towards me, then sits between me and Chloe, who is now just looking at her cupcake, not knowing just what to do. Chloe's mom has resumed her conversation with her friend; at the same time she is absentmindedly shoveling yellow and mushy babyfood into one of the kids strapped into the stroller. Emma smiles at Chloe and asks "is it good?" Chloe nods and smiles a big wide smile. The two moms look at Emma and then look at each other hard. This is when Emma gives me a soft kiss on the cheek, signaling that it's time to go. We get up. The moms take Emma in, then they look at me, then they look back at Emma. I smile, and say, "have fun." Emma turns to Chloe and waves. Then she pushes the plate with the chocolate chubby a little closer to Chloe and whispers "eat the icing first."

Outside it is hot. Emma wants to go home. She is giving me a look that I have come to love. "Let's go home and eat some icing," she says.

Richard Safir
hizenberg@go.com

go back