Blood Holes, part 1

Giving up meat was remarkably easy. I’d never really liked it. During an Easter Sunday dinner when we were kids, my brother Chris announced that there were ‘blood holes’ in the ham. He pointed to the cross sections of white veins in the meat. Their presence was something I’d noticed before but tried to ignore. What my brother said made me think of this: The pig had been alive; blood once coursed through its body.

Chris thought the blood holes were funny. He couldn’t stop laughing, and he kept saying the phrase ‘blood holes’ over and over again. Having them identified as blood holes severely put me off. I couldn’t finish the slab on my plate.

My parents weren't happy that I wanted to waste a perfectly good slice of ham. I’d recently demanded that my mother buy wheat bread instead of the loaves of white bread that everyone ate, and that had not made them happy either, although my father was known to swipe slices of wheat for snacks. We lived in Sacramento then, and I was severely influenced by California’s fixation on bodily health, though my palette and palate both were limited: I would fix myself a plate of the wheat bread, which looked like nothing so much as white bread with bits of grain injected back into it, with a slice of American cheese (yes, the orange sliver in the little plastic sheath), a handful of grapes, a celery stick, and a dollop of cottage cheese.

Mom thought these self-prepared meals ridiculous. “You’re going to be hungry an hour later,” she’d say, and unfortunately, she was right.

But here's the thing: My mother is the master, the dojo of odd food restrictions and weight control. She was sitting at the dinner table the night of the ‘blood holes’ incident only because it was Easter. She ate dinner with the rest of the family on holidays, but not otherwise. She made dinner every night but did not eat it. I grew up thinking that all mothers refrained from eating dinner, and on the rare occasion that I had dinner at friends’ houses, it was surprising to me when the lady of the house sat down with the rest of the family and picked up her fork. It seemed wrong, elicit, as if the dining room were being invaded. Dinner tables were for men and children.

Say the word ‘anorexic,’ and most people envision an emaciated woman who looks like the bride of Skeletor. Just yesterday, I saw a woman who looked like that. There was no way this woman wasn’t an anorexic or suffering from some other disease because her face looked no different than the Halloween cut-out of a skeleton in the yard behind her. I could see the iliac crest of her pelvis through her jeans. I could see the sockets within which her eyeballs hung. I know skinny people, and I know anorexics. There’s a difference.

But my mother didn’t look like that back then. She looked like all the other moms--not fat, but not skinny either. My mother bore four children. She had stretch marks across her belly that eliminated, in her way of thinking, any chance of ever wearing a bikini again. She had what cruel people call ‘flabby thighs,’ and she would demonstrate this point by grabbing hold of the flesh in one hand and shaking it back and forth, which we kids found profoundly gross at the time, and hilarious, but which now saddens me every time I remember it.

Her lack of the kind of physique that would bring her happiness was not without tremendous effort on her part, no matter how unsuccessful. I cannot remember a time when my mother wasn’t on a diet or enduring one faddish exercise regimen or another.

Once she bought a plastic contraption that hooked onto a doorknob. She was supposed to strap herself into it and move her arms and legs around so that the plastic ropes slid along a pulley mechanism. She exercised so furiously, the plastic burned, a noxious fume emitting from the device. The rope itself melted. Later, she purchased a rubber tummy squeezer and jogged while wearing it, once to the point of collapse. When she took it off after a run, it was the ugliest thing: warm, smelly rubber dripping sweat onto the floor. She and her best friend Dawn would take us to General Nutrition Center, where we could sample papaya-flavored pills and chips that tasted like cardboard. Afterward, they assuaged our complaints with ice cream sundaes from Swensen’s.

Around the time of the blood holes incident, Mom’s fad was “Twenty-Minute Workout” on television with its big-haired woman in leotards and pink leg warmers. She was a daily devotee, and I joined her. That was my first taste of aerobics. At one point she caved in to the ad on TV and sent away for the “Twenty-Minute Workout” record, which never arrived.

None of these efforts were successful enough for her; nothing she did during the two decades of her marriage to my father could get her satisfactorily skinny. I knew, even then, that my mother wanted to fade away into nothingness, to be like the sharply pointed women in the magazines: haughty, with thighs so hollow, their flesh doesn’t touch even when their heels are pursed together as tightly as lips. My mother eventually, years later, got her wish.

From Meat: A Memoir. Technorati Profile

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I knew, even then, that my mother wanted to fade away into nothingness, to be like the sharply pointed women in the magazines: haughty, with thighs so hollow, their flesh doesn’t touch even when their heels are pursed together as tightly as lips. My mother eventually, years later, got her wish.

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11. Redecorate all pale clothing in manner that not even a 90 degree wash can eradicate
12. Hurl at unsuspecting passers by
13. Prick self repeatedly
14. Smear purple on your siblings faces

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Around the time of the blood holes incident, Mom’s fad was “Twenty-Minute Workout” on television with its big-haired woman in leotards and pink leg warmers. She was a daily devotee, and I joined her. That was my first taste of aerobics. At one point she caved in to the ad on TV and sent away for the “Twenty-Minute Workout” record, which never arrived.

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