Actually, it made Fritzie hot and pained inside just to look at it. She didn’t eat butter and she didn’t eat cheese—too many calories in both—and she’d given up on bread around the time that Robert Kennedy was shot. What she had for breakfast when she had breakfast was a half a grapefruit, untouched by sugar. It was good for her and it should have tasted good to her, but she had never gotten over hating it. For a while it had made her wonder if she was crazy. Then all the research about eating disorders had come out, and Fritzie had been able to relax. She was just one of those people whose psychological needs overwhelmed their physical ones entirely. She couldn’t love the foods that were good for her the way normal people did because there was something wrong with her brain. If she hadn’t hated therapy almost as much as she hated grapefruit, she would have gone in for it. Instead, she found herself wishing she could have a different kind of eating disorder than the one she had. She wished she could be an anorexic.
It won’t hurt me if I have just one blueberry muffin, she thought to herself. I promise not to put any butter on it
She moved tentatively away from the door, realized she was still carrying her brown paper bag full of corn, and put it down on the floor. Over the last few seconds, she had become so tense she could barely move. Every muscle in her body seemed to have been stretched out into a wire. She edged toward the table, slowly, slowly, dragging herself against some invisible undertow. She thought if she moved any faster she would leap at the plates and eat them along with anything that was on them.
She had made it halfway across the floor, inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, when she heard the latch on the door jiggle. Fritzie froze in place, unable to breathe. The latch jiggled again and then the door opened. Fritzie looked at the plate piled high with blueberry muffins and bit her lip. Then she turned around to see who had come in behind her.
Who had come in behind her was Gregor Demarkian, and that made Fritzie confused. Gregor Demarkian didn’t know anything about her. He didn’t know what a terrible pig she could be about food or how hard it was for her to have any control over her eating. If she ate the entire plate of blueberry muffins in front of him, he would think she was an ordinary person with a larger than usual appetite this morning. He wouldn’t jump to condemn her. Fritzie looked back to the blueberry muffins again. Rationalizations aside, there wasn’t anything she could do about the blueberry muffins. As long as Mr. Demarkian was there to watch, she couldn’t allow herself to eat them.
“Well,” she said, “if it isn’t Mr. Demarkian. I was just going to have a cup of tea. Will you join me?”
“I take coffee,” Demarkian said. “And I’m going to have a lot more than that. Would you like me to pass you a muffin of some kind?”
“No, thank you. I don’t eat breakfast, as a rule.” Fritzie walked determinedly to the hot water kettle, poured now tepid water into a cup over a teaball she had found beside the spoons, and sat down. Where she was was as far from the food as it was possible to get and still sit at the table, but that wasn’t very far. Fritzie felt dizzy.
“Well,” she said again, “I suppose you’ve been detecting. Trying to find out what really happened to poor old Charlie Shay.”
Gregor picked up a plate, put a blueberry muffin and a bran muffin and a scone on it, then added a huge slab of butter to the mix. Then he looked around for a chair and sat down.
“I’d forgotten all about breakfast,” he said. “Forgetting about food happens a lot on this boat. I say it’s a terrible way to celebrate Thanksgiving.”
“That’s what I was doing here, trying to find a way to make the boat more festive for Thanksgiving.” Fritzie waved at the brown paper bag, abandoned now in the middle of the floor. “It’s full of the makings for decorations. I thought I’d put up some multicolored corn and make a cornucopia. Jon was never much for decorations. If it were up to him, all he’d have adorning his life would be things like this.”
Fritzie gestured dramatically at the ship in the bottle that reposed in a niche in the wall at the back end of the table. It had been there all along, of course, but the food had driven it away from her attention. Besides, she had lived for years with Jon and his ships in bottles. Mr. Demarkian was looking at it curiously, though.
“It’s very elaborate, isn’t it?” Fritzie said. “Jon started doing them when he was a boy, and as far as I know it’s his only form of relaxation. And practice makes perfect, you know, and he is in the way of being nearly perfect. Even the people who do this for a living admire Jon’s work. I’ve heard them say so.”