Week #19 of My Liquid Diet: The Back of the Mirror

Reflections on Ralph No. 1

Funhouse view:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at Start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at Start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at Start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at Start of Week #5: 215.1

• Weight at Start of Week #6: 211.2

• Weight at Start of Week #7: 208.1

• Weight at Start of Week #8: 204.3

• Weight at Start of Week #9: 201.9

• Weight at Start of Week #10: 199

• Weight at Start of Week #11: 196.8

• Weight at Start of Week #12: 194.4

• Weight at Start of Week #13: 193.5

• Weight at Start of Week #14: 190.2

• Weight at Start of Week #15: 185.6

• Weight at Start of Week #16: 183.8

• Weight at Start of Week #17: 182.3

• Weight at Start of Week #18: 179.4

• Weight at Start of Week #19: 177.6

• Weight at Start of Week #20 (current week): 177.2

Total weight loss so far: 52.8 lbs.

Eleven weeks to go.

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Photo: Fachmi Noviar.

One thing I hear a lot from people about my weight-loss is, “I can see it in your face!” I can see it too: When I look in the mirror, it’s almost as if a new guy is looking back at me. It’s somewhat disquieting, to be honest. In retrospect, I felt a kind of reassurance in my previous face’s almost perfect roundness. Internally I might have been fearful, but on the spherical surface of Planet Josh everything seemed to be going smoothly. Now there’s kind of an oval thing happening in my face’s overall shape, and there are these newly uncovered contours. Who knew I had cheekbones?

There was an evening, when I was about seven years old, that I found myself gazing at my reflection in my mother’s oval-shaped mirror, which I was holding after taking it from the top of her dresser. She was out on a date with her boyfriend, Ralph No. 1. I’d been going through a period of being constantly terrified that something awful might happen to her or to my dad — and that it would be my fault somehow. They’d divorced when I was a baby, after nine years of childless marriage, but I hoped that they’d eventually reunite and our family would be whole again. The sticking point seemed to be me. My emergence into the world had apparently triggered their rupture, and each time my dad returned me to my mom, after a weekend in his custody, there were loud, recriminatory words. I, who should have reflected back to them their fondest hopes, was the cause of their anguish.

Lately I’d begun having nightmares in which one or the other of them would die — horribly. Excruciating heart attack. Bloody car crash. It was keeping me up nights. I was miserable. But I couldn’t tell either of them what I was going through: maybe they’d gather that I was subconsciously hoping for their gruesome demise. Our son, the monster!

Into this roiling period of my boyhood, which went on for almost a year, came Ralph No. 1 — so nicknamed by my mom at a later time, after he’d been succeeded by another, lesser Ralph. This Ralph was handsome and charismatic — a transplant to New York City from the opposite coast, where, in a magical place called Southern California, he had once been a bodysurfer. Bodysurfer! My mind reeled at the thought as my mom introduced me to him after he’d arrived for their first date. As a kid who could barely muster the courage, or balance, to deal with the rather tame waves at Jones Beach, I found it hard to conceive of how anyone could successfully ride a surfboard. But to surf with just your body? That was almost unimaginably badass.

Maybe that’s why I started punching him, as hard as I could, over and over — to see if he was really a superhero. He was sitting next to me on our living-room couch, as Mom put on her face in the bathroom. No matter how hard I punched him, he just smiled. There could have been some hurt and anger mixed in with my fascination: I may have sensed that, after years of Mom’s casual dating of various men, here was the first guy who might seriously threaten any prospect of her ever getting back together with Dad.

It turned out that Ralph No. 1 was in the midst of a career transition — from teaching high-school English to starting a small Off-Off-Broadway theater in the East Village, where he’d get to present, among other works, the plays he’d been laboring over in his spare time. In the early months of their relationship, many of their dates consisted of Mom hanging out while he worked at the theater. Then he started telling her that she should stay away from the theater — her presence harshed his mellow, or something. Once, she tearfully told me that she thought Ralph No. 1 was cheating on her with various actresses — while, strangely, he had become irrationally jealous of her. Sure enough, I started regularly hearing them yell at each other from behind the closed door of her bedroom. Well, mostly it was him yelling, and her crying.

But they continued going out together — though their dates now mostly involved expeditions to other theaters, so he could check out the competition. And it was on one of those date nights that I was lying on Mom’s bed, as I frequently did when she was out. I loved that bed — so much bigger and firmer than my own, with a luxurious bedspread in autumnal colors and a nightstand crammed with books by some of her most-beloved authors: Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, Susan Sontag. (Her dream was to become a writer approaching their stature.) I’d taken her mirror off the dresser and was gazing at my reflection as I waited for her to return. As it got later and later, well past the time when she’d told me she’d be back, I began to feel a rising sense of dread. And at around midnight my dread turned to panic. Had my recurring nightmares of parental calamity somehow begun to spill over into the real world? Was my mother dead? I started sobbing.

I’m not sure what impelled me to do what I did next. I got up, went over to the dresser, picked up my mom’s red lipstick and used it to write, on the back of the mirror: “YES or NO?” Then I put the mirror back on the dresser, lay back down on her bed, and fell asleep — until Mom finally came home, roused me, and sent me back to my own room.

Photo: ediebloom.

Weeks later, I heard Ralph No. 1 shouting — more angrily than I’d ever heard him — from inside Mom’s bedroom. Both of our bedrooms were at the back of our building, which was in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Looking out our windows, we got Rear Window-like views into many floors of apartments in the next building over, from which our building was separated by a narrow alley; and of course those neighbors had the same view of us. Reconstructing what happened that day, a neighbor from the next building must have complained to Ralph No. 1, across that narrow alley, about the ruckus he was making with all his yelling. And Ralph — his manly, bodysurfing pride having been wounded by the neighbor’s intrusion into his rant (not to mention how all of us playwrights are hypersensitive to criticism) — started shouting back at him. Angry words were exchanged — Ralph’s in English, the neighbor’s in Spanish. When I ran over to peer in through Mom’s bedroom doorway, Ralph was giving the guy the finger. Shortly after that, windows on both sides of the alley were slammed shut and shades were pulled down.

Cut to a few days later. Mom was away at work. I was in my room, watching TV — a delightful innovation in my life, as she had just allowed me to finally have one (at last I could join my classmates in following Batman and Star Trek! ) — while enjoying a snack from a fold-out TV tray. Suddenly a large, jagged chunk of concrete came crashing through my window. I screamed, threw myself on the floor, then crawled into the living room and huddled there until Mom got home. She swept up all the broken glass, and our building’s superintendent replaced the windowpane. Then, a few days later, as I was watching an ad on TV, it happened again: another big rock, incoming. Crash! Smash! Pow! Holy Commercial Breakage, Batman!

After the third such attack, our super, who seemingly knew everyone in the neighborhood (but somehow was helpless when it came to our building’s temperamental boiler), launched his own investigation — while, in the meantime, covering the outside of my window with protective chicken wire. Ultimately he concluded that the neighbor, angered by his contretemps with Ralph No. 1, had become bent on revenge — and had unfortunately mistaken my bedroom window for Mom’s. The neighbor, once alerted to his faulty aim, came to regret his actions, and the onslaughts ceased.

But the chicken-wire netting over my window remained. And I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d brought the whole thing on myself. At some point Mom had told me how Ralph No. 1’s tirade had been triggered by finding the words “YES or NO?” written in red lipstick on the back of her dresser-top mirror. He’d assumed (projecting?) that this was a playful message from another lover. So I’d set this whole chain of events in motion, and now the chickens had come home to roost.

Photo: carstenbrandt.

As Mom’s relationship with Ralph No. 1 continued to deteriorate, I agonized over why I’d written that little message. It was a mystery to me, and remains so. Maybe I saw something in my reflection that evening that made me feel doubtful, even torn. Did I want things to work out between her and Ralph No. 1? Or did I still hope for her to reconcile with my dad? Were my continuing nightmares an indication of a malevolence deep within me, which would eventually pry my parents away not just from each other but also from anyone else who might try to love them?

YES or NO?

Happily, my fears were largely ameliorated by my dad’s sweet new girlfriend, Sue, who’d recently started teaching at the middle school where he taught. One day, when Dad was out, I tearfully told her about the brutal nightmares I’d been having about him and my mom.

“Am I a terrible person, Sue?” I asked her. “Do I seem hateful to you?”

She smiled at me. “Joshy,” she said, “you’re having those dreams because you love your parents.”

And just like that, my long nightmare — all those nightmares — ended. With a few kind words.

It didn’t end up working out between Mom and Ralph No. 1 — though they kept dating, on and off, for years (so he also became Ralph No. 3). But Dad and Sue eventually got married, had three spectacular children, and enjoyed a loving relationship until his stroke at the age of 55. Afterwards, Sue cared for him with such heroic dedication, and in such dire financial circumstances, that I am filled with awe to recall it. After Dad died, four years later, Sue — weakened, I believe, by the rigors of caregiving and poverty — struggled with her health until her own untimely passing.

When I look at myself in the mirror these days, wondering at the emerging landscape of my thinning face, with its new hills and valleys, I also see a palimpsest containing traces of my prior selves, going all the way back into my childhood. So very many times, for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve worried that I’m unworthy of love — that I’m a person who breaks things. As this diet has progressed, and I’ve felt better and better, I’ve had a nagging thought: I don’t deserve this. But I know that I do! My saving grace, I suspect, is that I am easily susceptible to kindness. To someone telling me, It’s okay. To someone reminding me of something that I know to be true: I am filled with love, so much! And this love sometimes makes me worry, makes me crazy. Gives me nightmares! But love is the underlying truth — I’m sure of this!

YES or NO?

YES!!!