Free Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni Page B

I never knew exactly how many, because at a certain point I just stopped getting on scales. I didn’t like what they told me. I was about five feet ten, only three-quarters of an inch under what I’d grow to be, and according to those rigorous medical charts of ideal weights at certain heights, I should have been 170 pounds. But I often weighed above 180, and I could blame only some of those extra pounds on big bones and a genuinely broad frame.
    During physicals in doctors’ offices, I averted my eyes from the scale and instructed the doctor not to tell me the number. Usually the doctor just chuckled as he wrote it on his chart. Sometimes he said, “I’d like it if you lost five to ten pounds.” He never said, “You’re fine the way you are.” I know because I listened for that—listened for some indication that I was wrong about myself.
    Ten pounds: it wasn’t a disaster. I recognized that. But it was aggravating. Maddening. It was the distance between me and some confident, enviable, all-American ideal that might well be mine if I could just turn away from yet another quarter of club sandwich, from the third buttered yam at Thanksgiving, from the second bowl of ice cream I’d carry up to my bedroom—in Avon I had my own bedroom, connected to Mark’s by a shared bathroom—at eleven thirty on a weeknight when I was up late studying.
    The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it—were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.
    With 31s and 32s, I could wear whatever color and cut of shirt I wanted instead of the vertical stripes and the dark blues, browns and blacks that Mom said flattered me most. I could wear the madras sport jacket I’d tried on in a Hartford department store, the one she had told me wasn’t “particularly slimming,” or the kind of red plaid flannel shirt that was also—according to Mom, and according to the mirror—a sartorial no-no.
    One of my best friends, Adrian, a fellow swimmer on the Loomis team whom I regularly harangued into going along with me to late movies on Friday or Saturday nights, had a shirt like that. But then he also had a thirty-one-inch waist, even though he stood three inches taller than I did, with broader shoulders.
    On some of those Friday and Saturday nights, I’d get home after midnight and, though I’d had dinner earlier, grab two or three hamburger patties from the freezer in the garage, put them on a broiler pan and shove them under the broiler, flipping them as soon as I thought I could get away with it and leaving them on that second side for maybe five minutes tops.
    My preference for rare burgers, by then established, started out as a matter not of taste but of haste. Rare burgers came soonest off the grill or out of the oven.
     
     
     
     
    Partly because I tried not to, I was always thinking about food. Mark was always thinking about Amy, his girlfriend during his senior year at Loomis, which was my junior year. And since he and I shared the car for the half-hour drive between Avon and the Loomis campus, I spent almost as much time around her as he did.
    Actually, I spent most of that time with her best friend, Ann, who kept me company while Mark and Amy stole away somewhere. In Amy’s house, Ann’s house, or a house that Amy frequently watched for friends of her family’s, Ann and I would listen to Neil Young’s Harvest or After the Gold Rush , to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and the