Quiet-I'm on a Diet
by ALFRED TOOMBS
ALFRED TOOMBS was a newspaperman in Washington and Chicago before settling down as a free lance in southern Maryland. He is the author of Raising a Riot, and Crowell will publish this fall his Honeymoon for Seven.
ABOUT once a year, my wife takes a look at my silhouette and pushes me onto the bathroom scales. The reading invariably shows that I have gained at least ten pounds.
I am willing to shrug this matter off, but she is not. “There’s a diet starting in the paper today,” she says. “You should try it. You’d lose that ten pounds in a couple of weeks.”
I spend the next two weeks avoiding the subject, but this effort nets me a loss of only one pound. When further resistance to her is useless, I begin the ordeal.
Diets are horrible enough, but the way they are run at our place they become something that the Chinese simply had not yet perfected when they introduced the water torture.
The fare on our table is the sort of plain, sturdy home-cooking which has made it possible for so many French and Italian restaurants to prosper in this country. But when I have whipped myself up to a frenzy of selfdenial, my wife begins to practice spectacular rites in the kitchen. The result is that, instead of the lowcalorie roast chicken which normally appears on Sunday, we have fried chicken or chicken and dumplings. The cauliflower and cabbage, which are usually served with pristine plainness, now come drenched in rich sauces.
If my diet permits me to have two ounces of noodles at a meal, my wife will knock herself out to come up with some casserole containing noodles, mushrooms, bits of bacon, and black walnuts, soaked in a butter sauce and topped with baked cheese. When I sit staring at it moodily, trying to figure how to sort out the noodles from the calories, she will say, “Take some of the crispy part on top. You look so hungry.”
“But that’s cheese,” I protest. “I am supposed to be eating noodles.”
“But you’re allowed cheese on your diet,” she insists.
“That was for lunch,” I reply. ”I got one ounce of cheese with my lettuce and tomato salad with the, ugh, mineral oil dressing.”
“Oh, pshaw,” she says. “And I put cheese on your apple pie, too. . . . Why are you looking at me like that? I know you’re supposed to get an apple for dessert tonight.”
The children, seeing how I am suffering, traipse home from school with their candy ration intact. They rush up and wave candy bars under my nose; and if I refuse to take a bite, their feelings are deeply hurt. It is about this time that all of our friends in faraway places (a) begin to drop in for a visit, bringing boxes of candy and bottles of high calorie whiskey, or (b) suddenly start sending us rare cheeses and fruit cakes. I never have figured out how the word gets around the country so fast that I’m on a diet.
The last, time I went through this ordeal, I resolved that it would indeed be the last time. So when my wife began her annual agitation about my waistline recently, I made no protest about going on a diet. On the first night of the regime, she served broccoli as the diet specified. I gobbled it down, along with the hollandaise sauce she had thoughtfully improvised. I drank the cocoa she served when she decided I must be getting tired of skimmed milk. I ate the chocolates the kids shoved into my mouth; and when Aunt Edith sent candied fruit, I loaded up on it.
When the two weeks of dieting were up, I weighed myself and found I had gained two pounds. “Well, I’m back to normal,”I announced to my family. “Now I can start eating like a human again.”
Everyone lost interest in me immediately. Cabbage came out of the kitchen — boiled, period. Chickens were roasted again, and the kids managed to do away with all their gumdrops before they got home from school. My old buddy Pat, who had come through with pecan pralines from Texas when I was on my last diet, sent us pickled Swedish fish this time.
While nobody was watching, I lost fifteen pounds.