“After we had our twins we set out to devise a pure and healthy alternative to the chemical-filled drinks out there. We wanted something our whole family would enjoy,” Ellsworthy told us. “We loved broccoli and we loved water and so we thought, ‘Why not make broccoli water!’?”
Now the real secret to H2BROC is in how you serve it. The drink is best served in a mason jar, and not just any mason jar, but a mason jar manufactured before 1957.
Why? Nineteen fifty-seven was the time that mason jars ceased containing cadmium. Cadmium reacts with the free radicals in broccoli to pull all the nutrients out of the vegetable and directly into your bloodstream.
Not only will H2BROC fill you up, it will also absorb into your skin to reverse the process of aging. Super food doesn’t get more super than that!
“Where’s your scale?” CJ asked, rooting around in the cabinet beneath Janey’s sink. “I see European toothpaste, a bottle of Penhaligon’s aftershave, Laundress delicate wash powder, and a jar of Moroccan oil. No scale.”
“I don’t have one,” Janey shouted to her best girlfriend from the kitchen of her apartment. She leaned precariously out the window as she took turns puffing on a mint cigarette and sipping a Diet Coke. Janey gazed out over the perfectly manicured Gramercy Gardens. She’d never actually gone inside them. She was always too busy working.
CJ strode out of the bathroom and down the hallway of Janey’s two-bedroom prewar apartment that Michael was currently contesting in their divorce proceedings, despite the fact that she put in the bulk of the down payment and paid the entire mortgage for the past two years.
“Who doesn’t own a scale?” CJ was incredulous. “And what the hell are you doing?”
“I’ve never had a scale. My clothes fit or they don’t fit. They usually fit. Right now…ehhhhh,” Janey groaned, pulling in a drag of the herbal horror and thumbing her phone. She’d been googling “lose weight fast,” “fat removal,” and “crash diet.” She still couldn’t believe Beau was doing this. Janey toggled to her Facebook feed, which these days was filled with photographs of artfully arranged fruits and vegetables, articles extolling the virtues of a raw diet, and inspirational quotes like “You are not going to get the butt you want by sitting on it” and “Keep calm, get skinny.” She leaned against the wall to steady herself. The cigarette made her light-headed.
“I’m dieting,” she yelled back at CJ. “Diet Coke and weird cigarettes. It kept me skinny in my twenties. Remember? You too!”
CJ sighed and snatched the cigarette out of her hand, stared at it, took a drag, and crinkled her nose before stubbing it out into the porcelain kitchen sink.
“It didn’t keep me skinny in my twenties. I’ve never had your luck…or your metabolism. Come on! We need to weigh you. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
CJ, short for Chakori Jeevika (her Indian immigrant parents were insistent that an Americanized nickname would help their daughter fit in at school), had been her best girlfriend since college. Back then, CJ tacked photos of Kate Moss to their miniature dorm fridge as “thinspiration,” coveting the look of the androgynous model in those Calvin Klein ads from the nineties where everyone wore the same unisex white tank top and sullen expression.
“Why don’t you ever have to diet?” CJ whined, and Janey would shrug. She was lucky, she guessed. But she wouldn’t stay that way forever. She had pictures in her apartment of her mom and dad from their early twenties and thirties, both slim and fit. But as they aged their waistlines grew in a direct correlation to Reginald’s love for Lorna’s buttery, sugary cooking. The most exercise she’d ever seen them do was walking eighteen holes on the golf course.
CJ and Janey became truly close during what Janey now referred to as her Beau-free period of six years of university and graduate school. They’d bonded over being away from home, having anxiety attacks when they tried to smoke pot, and using coed bathrooms for the first time. They were both aliens at Princeton. CJ grew up in a first-generation bubble, her social life limited to aunties, cousins, and friends of her parents who spoke Hindi at home and had no use for outsiders. Janey’s deep southern accent and use of the word “y’all” made the northern girls giggle, not in a mean way, but enough to make her feel strange. The two girls were also both only children, so they agreed it was weird to see boys in the bathroom plucking at their nose hairs with tweezers and leaving disgusting specimens in the shared toilets. Neither of them liked eating cafeteria food when they were both so used to their moms’ home cooking. CJ’s mom and aunties sent her to school with giant containers of samosas and pakoras, not understanding the limitations of their dorm room mini fridge or the fact that CJ was embarrassed when she made the entire building smell like cumin. But rather than throw them out, CJ would eat only samosas for days until they were gone and then starve herself for the rest of the week, which made her hungry and crabby and unpleasant to live with.
As long as Janey had known her, CJ Goldberg née Lakshmi had been a varsity-level dieter, sometimes juggling two diets at a time. She applied the same mathematical precision she used in her old job as a hedge fund analyst with $5 billion under management to calculate her caloric intake. She could rattle off the amount of saturated fat in nearly any food product and knew to a tenth of a mile how much she walked in a day. And yet none of the dieting made CJ any skinnier for longer than two weeks, except for that month the two girls spent mucking about in India after senior year, traveling from Mumbai to Jaipur to Delhi and finally Rishikesh, when they both contracted giardia and lost fifteen pounds each. CJ still talked about it, nearly twenty years later, in dreamlike tones.
“Wasn’t that just the best diet ever?” she liked to recall. “It was even better than Atkins.”
“Fixing” herself was CJ’s only irrational habit. In the rest of her life she was practical to a fault. She’d married a lawyer, had adorable twin boys, and sat for Shabbat dinner with her mother-in-law every single Friday night even though she didn’t believe in God. CJ began working part-time after she had the babies, but she never quite got into the rhythm of being a stay-at-home mom, so she was constantly piling on new projects and programs. Janey couldn’t blame her. It felt strange to be sitting around her apartment on what should be a work day.
“What diet are you doing right now?” Janey asked her.
“Clay.”
“The Dr. Clay diet? Never heard of him. Does he work uptown?”
“No. I’m eating clay. Just clay,” CJ asserted in her husky and calculating voice. “Clay for breakfast, clay for lunch, clay for dinner. Everyone’s eating clay. Karlie Kloss and all the girls do it before the shows.”