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

appetite, at least if I wanted to avoid the “fat boy” catcalls and the husky section. Away from her, I had to work on this weird psychic muscle Mom kept chattering about, this thing called willpower.
    Until, somewhat miraculously, I didn’t. Something other than Atkins came along. Something more effective.

Three
    Mom and Dad signed up Mark, Harry and me for swimming lessons because it was the responsible, safe thing to do, given all the time we spent on the shore in Madison. In between our Little League games and our tennis lessons, Mom ferried us to the pool at the White Plains YMCA, where we graduated rapidly from beginner to intermediate to advanced classes, the ascending levels named for ever-bigger fish: guppy, then minnow, then shark. It didn’t take us long to become sharks. We were naturals, all three of us. Even me.
    So we joined the YMCA team and started regularly attending practices, at first just a few times a week, then every day. Before long, swimming elbowed out all the other sports in our lives.
    “If you’re going to do something, you should do it well,” Mom always said to us, by which she meant we should be the absolute best at it, at least if there was any possibility of that. When it came to her children, she seldom thought there wasn’t the possibility of that.
    Besides, she wanted a family of winners, wanted to stand on the pool deck and bask in the compliments from other parents, in the envy she was certain they felt.
    “Mrs. Turner couldn’t even look at me after you beat Johnny in the freestyle,” she’d say to me, her expression and voice gleeful. “Next time, you have to beat him in the butterfly, too.”
    “You can ,” she’d continue, less as show of support than as admonition. “You were only a half second behind today, and that’s only because you got off the blocks so slowly. You were klutzy off the blocks. You need to work on your start.”
    I was good in the freestyle and the butterfly and even the backstroke. To the astonishment of everyone in the family—and to my astonishment most of all—I was good at more events than Mark or Harry, and I got better all the time. By eleven I had so many trophies and medals that Mom boxed the oldest and smallest of them and toted them up to the attic. Water, it turned out, was my element. All my fumbling, flailing and sluggishness vanished when I entered it.
    Dad would have been as happy to have Mark, Harry and me spending our athletic hours on a basketball court or in a hockey ring: those were the sports he watched on TV and knew well. Those were guys’ sports.
    But Mom was partial to swimming. It didn’t make her nervous the way some other sports did; there wasn’t any way for us to get scratched, bruised or knocked down. It was easy to follow, each competitor given a lane of his or her own, the goal no more complicated than getting to the wall at the end of the last lap before anyone else did.
    Most of all, it didn’t leave me out. She’d found something that Mark, Harry and I could all participate in with some success. She’d found an arena in which I had cause to feel confident among other kids my age, in which I could mingle with them from a position of strength. Good grades in school had never won their respect the way first-place finishes in the pool did.
    On top of which, I was getting exercise. I was slimming down. Not as much as I should have been, because I was eating more than I had before all the swimming—I was even hungrier. But the extra exercise outpaced the extra eating; the balance worked in my favor. Mom, I could tell, was relieved.
    To me, though, it didn’t feel like an out-and-out victory or even like clear-cut progress. It felt in some ways like a mean little joke: I’d lost some of my flab only to put what remained on more prominent display, in a bathing suit. I wished I’d tripped across a talent for fencing—and been able to tent my body in one of those beekeeper-style suits. But instead I had