After a discussion of everything but the Standing on the Table Incident, Marissa said, “Thank you for dinner. It’s just what I needed—fresh but reasonable.”

“You’re welcome, sweetie. I know that the science has changed in the last twenty years but when I was trying to lose weight after you were born I did realize how easy it was to put two hundred or three hundred extra calories into any meal. Thinking two tablespoons of oil was only one. Salad dressing—I absolutely have to have it or I get hungry right away. But it’s so easy to think you’re only having half of what you actually poured. And I know the first time I saw how little four ounces of steak was I was shocked.”

Marissa nodded vigorously. “I figured out I don’t miss beef in my diet, that’s for sure, not when I can have twice the fish or chicken and still have eaten half the calories and fat, most of the time.”

“Goat cheese.”

“What about it? I love it—just discovered it on vacation.”

“It’s full of air and water so you can have a great big dollop on nearly anything.”

Marissa perked up. Finally, some good news. “I’ve been trying to accept that I’m one of those people who has to look at the oils and the cheeses and the dressings all the time. Not just one meal a day. Every meal. Forever. It’s . . . depressing. And I feel a bit stupid for having waited this long to figure it out. Like if I ate a dozen Oreos every day eventually they would stop being fattening.”

Her mother chuckled. “They say if you do the same thing over and over expecting different results it’s a sign of mental illness.”

“Guilty as charged, I guess.” Though she was joking, inside Marissa could feel herself sobering. There was something to think over in what her mother had just said.

Later, after a stroll around the exterior of the golf course, Marissa headed home in a confused state of mind. A light drizzle had ended another spate of clear, cool weather and the scrape of the wipers was annoying.

She knew part of her was reeling from the idea that her parents had gotten high and she’d been conceived as a result but she supposed it wasn’t that uncommon of a story. Added to her mother’s explanations of some of her hurtful behavior and general acceptance of Marissa as a lesbian, it was enough to feel as if she’d landed in the Twilight Zone.

But that wasn’t what left her feeling distracted and deeply puzzled. She kept turning over and over the idea that as a teen and young woman she’d been overeating, willfully. She had needed the food more than feeling good about herself. She knew she’d started wearing big clothes to hide her breasts. After a year of snacks, sweets and second helpings at the school cafeteria, the big clothes had fit.

Stopped at a long light with valley lights twinkling through the drizzle, she said aloud, “All those boys you pushed at me, Mom, I never got along with any of them. And more than one was a perv. They had their hands all over me no matter what I said. You sent me on dates with boys and only you thought they were gentlemen. I think . . . I think . . . because you got a friend to get their son to ask me out, they thought I was desperate and I’d let them do anything they wanted. I was the fat girl who was supposed to be grateful.”