“I would love that,” she said. He’d squeezed her fingers, and she’d smiled at him. Later, Abby would think that their reunion had felt as frictionless as a door swinging open on freshly oiled hinges; like something preordained.
If it had been any other old acquaintance, Abby would have anchored Saturday’s tour with her favorite places to eat. There would have been brunch at Sabrina’s, then some walking, and people-watching. There might have been a trip to the Barnes or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, followed by hummus and fresh pita at Dizengoff or tahini milkshakes at Goldie, then a stroll east to Spruce Street Harbor Park for fried chicken sandwiches at Federal Donuts, ice cream from Franklin Fountain, and drinks at Oasis… but could Mark eat any of that? Would Mark even want to?
“Do you want to walk?” Abby asked on Saturday morning. She’d met him at his apartment on Rittenhouse Square, where the carpet was immaculately vacuumed, the white couch was pristine, and the black-and-white beachscapes in their silver frames were precisely aligned on the wall. “Or we could rent bikes.” There was an Indego kiosk a few blocks from Mark’s apartment. Abby had passed it on her way there. They’d gotten lucky with the weather. After a stretch of bitterly cold days, the sun was shining, the wind had died down, and the temperature was in the fifties.
Mark’s gaze had drifted toward the ground. “I don’t know if you remember,” he’d said, his voice low. “I don’t actually know how to ride a bike.”
“Oh, God,” Abby said. “I totally forgot.”
“I know,” Mark said, a little shamefaced. “It’s weird.”
“It’s fine. Really. Lots of people don’t know how to ride bikes.” Just not many our age, Abby thought, even as she was chiding herself for not remembering. “We can walk.”
She’d ended up taking him through Rittenhouse Square Park, past the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. They’d sat on a bench in Washington Square, where Mark complained that she wasn’t showing him any of the city’s real history. “Where was the first Wawa built?” he asked plaintively. “When are we going to the birthplace of the Eagles fans who threw the battery at Santa?”
Abby glared at him severely. “Okay, first of all, the batteries were at a Phillies game. The Eagles fans threw snowballs. And Santa deserved it,” she said. “If you’re going to live here, you need to get on board with that.”
“Fine, fine,” he said. “Let’s continue with the Dead White Men tour.” He shook his head sadly. “I have to say, though, I expected better of you.”
Just for that, Abby walked him back to City Hall, and the statue of Octavius Catto, a Black athlete and activist who’d desegregated the city’s trolleys and who was assassinated on Election Day in 1871 while he tried to bring Black voters to the polls. They walked east, to the mural of a young Black woman’s face on Eleventh and Sansom, which had been done by Amy Sherald, whose painting of Michelle Obama hung in the National Portrait Gallery, and Abby told Mark there was a tour he could take of the city’s many murals.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Or shall we continue on to the Betsy Ross House?”
“I could eat,” Mark said.
Can you? Abby wondered. She’d never known anyone who’d had the surgery and didn’t know what Mark’s limitations were.
“I can,” he said when she asked. “Most foods. As long as I don’t eat too much, and I chew everything really carefully.”
Awesome, Abby thought, and hoped she’d kept her face expressionless. They walked east, toward the Delaware River, trading stories of the last decade and a half.
“This was my favorite place to take the kids when I was a nanny,” Abby told him. “There’s a skating rink at the end of the pier. You can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. And there’s a dog park past that. And you can ride the ferry over to Camden and back again. Which little kids are surprisingly into.”
Mark nodded. They’d gotten fried chicken sandwiches at Federal Donuts after all, and they sat on the ledge by the water to eat them. Abby had devoured half of her sandwich before Mark had even tasted his. She watched, trying not to be obvious about it, as he pulled off the bun and the pickles and painstakingly removed every bit of breading from his chicken breast.
“Are you sure this is okay for you?” she finally asked. “We can go someplace else. There’s great sushi. And there’s an amazing place where they make fresh hummus…”
“No, no,” he’d said firmly. “This is fine.” He’d taken a big bite of bare chicken to prove it. Abby had watched his jaw work as he chewed. She remembered how he’d looked when he’d told her about his surgery. “Nothing was working,” he’d said, his head bent and his voice so quiet it was almost inaudible, as if what he was confessing—being fat and unable to become otherwise—was worse than being a criminal, or a sex offender. “And nothing was going to work.”
“Yeah, most diets don’t work, in the long term,” Abby said. “And Camp Golden Hills probably did us more harm than good.” By then, she’d done plenty of reading about shows like The Biggest Loser and places like Camp Golden Hills, and how the science showed that radically restrictive diets and hours of vigorous exercise yielded short-term loss that was almost inevitably followed by the dieter regaining every pound they’d shed and then some. She’d learned that losing the weight a second, or third, or fourth time was complicated by the way the dieter’s metabolism slowed down, the dieter’s body determined to hang on to the pounds the next time it was threatened with starvation. She knew about the weight-loss drugs, and the surgical options—mostly because Eileen insisted on mailing her links every few weeks, usually with a note attached that said something like Gary and I would be more than happy to help with this! She had done a lot of reading, and listened to a lot of podcasts about body positivity and health at every size, and how diet culture and Western beauty standards contributed to, and were fed by, capitalism and racism and misogyny in an endless loop that left women hungry and unhappy with empty bellies and depleted bank accounts, starving and tractable, too weak to change the world, or the way they had to move through it.
Hating yourself took a toll: on your finances, your self-esteem, your time. That afternoon, Abby told Mark that she’d decided to stop dieting and to focus on her health; that she did her best to practice intuitive eating honoring her body’s appetites.
“My doctor doesn’t even have a scale in her office. Which is refreshing. I can remember going to see my pediatrician for ear infections, and getting a lecture about being more active and eating more fruits and vegetables,” Abby said. She told Mark that she exercised, only she did it for strength and endurance and flexibility and maintaining her sanity, not weight loss. She told him that her doctor thought that the BMI was garbage, that yo-yo dieting was worse than being quote-unquote overweight or obese, and that any body could be a healthy body, whether or not it fit current definitions of what was beautiful. She said that she was mostly okay—or that she was trying, every day, to be okay—at her current size and had no intention of trying to make herself smaller.